Saskatoon Web Design

Net Neutrality in Canada

2008-11-20T09:35:00.002-06:00

In case you missed it, the CRTC has just ruled in favour of Bell Canada with regards to their practice of 'shaping' internet traffic through their networks.

I won't go into detail about the decision except to highlight that the CRTC has left the larger issue of the legality of traffic shaping open to future decisions. They have been specific in that they have decided that Bell Canada treated it's 'partners' who lease their network the same way they have treated their retail customers. It's a funny partnership when you change the terms of the agreement without telling your customers, deny it, then become intransient enough to force them to take you to a regulatory body.

What bothers me most about this decision and the practice of throttling is that it seems rather short sighted. The 'problem' as defined by Bell is that some users are congesting the internet by using it too much (through peer to peer networking).

Really?

First off, I know I pay a premium for a certain speed of access to the internet (5MB/sec). My ISP goes to lengths to assure me that I'll only achieve that speed in optimum conditions and that they will never guarantee it. Fair enough. I also know that I can't go beyond that speed due to limits placed on my connection to the internet by my ISP. Fair enough.

Why does Bell think that they have the right to charge for that access (which you rarely ever receive at the best of times), then artificially reduce your speed even more? If it truly is the case that their network cannot handle their customers using the services paid for on a monthly basis, then reduction of services doesn't seem like a long term solution.

The analagy used in the Globe and Mail is of a highway with dedicated streams of traffic. This is false and misleading, here's a better one...

Bob works downtown. He drives to work. In the city he lives in, all parking stalls are owned by a group of private companies. So, in order to park downtown, he pays a monthly fee to one of them for a parking stall. The company in charge of the lot naturally tries to maximize revenue by overbooking all of their parking lots. Bob deals with this, sometimes it takes him longer to find an open space, even though the price he pays per month for the stall does not change.

One day though, he is stopped on the way into the parking garage. The attendant says that they have been monitoring his use of the garage and have noticed that he parks for five days a week (Bob happens to have a full time job). This is not acceptable because it causes too much congestion in the garage. Imagine if everyone tried to use the garage every day. The solution to this problem is for Bob bike to work, he can park his bike in the garage too.

"But I've paid for a parking stall" says Bob.
"And so have all of our other customers", the attendant responds. "What makes you so special as to be able to use a parking stall every day? Surely you aren't so greedy as to think that you can use this space at the expense of others?"
"I suppose your right -- I'll start bringing my bike."
"Oh, by the way," the attendant called out as Bob left, "this month's fee is due, bring you chequebook when you come back".

A cynic might argue that perhaps Bell should sell fewer subscriptions, upgrade their network, or stop telling people that they offer high speed internet. I'm not paying extra so that my emails are sent at 10MB per second (that would allow me to send a few thousand emails per second, and I can't type that fast). Of course, this all might be moot. Who can really say if in the next five years internet traffic is going to increase or decrease. Maybe people in developing/developed countries will unplug themselves. Maybe people will decide they don't like reading the news online, teleconferencing, listening to music, catching up on tv series', talking with overseas relatives, and so on. Or, Bell can start preparing for yesterdays pattern of internet use.

Resource for Employers in Saskatoon

2008-10-31T14:54:00.002-06:00

New website up this week: www.edgeimmigration.com. It's the online arm of Edge Immigration, a consultant in Saskatoon that specializes in helping potential immigrants to Saskatchewan navigate the bureaucracy associated with the process.

Ed Ryan has helped local groups and individuals sponsor refugees, businesses attract foreign labour, and most importantly, he's helped the families of recent immigrants to come join their relatives.

Edge Immigration also has a blog component where Ed will be pointing and commenting on articles of interest to both potential and recent immigrants to Saskatchewan.

Happy Birthday Google

2008-09-07T19:59:00.003-06:00

For those that don't know, Google just turned 10 this week. Still pretty young, especially compared to the other kid on the block . . .

Microsoft seems to be getting older by the day (I know we all do, but some of us age better than others, Seinfeld humour being of the 'other' variety). As much as I'd like to comment on the commercial, I'll focus on the birthday boy and mention a few of their more useful services, many of which are competing directly with the 800 pound gorilla mentioned above.

Gmail

Gmail, can't effuse enough about this one. I don't bother with Outlook anymore. I prefer web based email regardless since it allows me to check it from anywhere and reduces my risk of contracting a virus. Add to that a far better search function, the ability to send emails from different addresses, huge storage space, and the best spam filter I've seen.

Gmail also marked the first time Google took a run at Microsoft. Though it seems ages ago now, it used to be that you'd expect to pay $5 a month for a decent email account through Yahoo, Hotmail, or other providers if you wanted more than 5 megabytes of storage. Google came from nowhere and offered up to a gigabyte for nothing. I currently have a limit of 7 gigs and it increases every second. They changed the way we think about web based email for the better.

Google Calendar

Another free application, google calendar has the advantage over a number of other calendars in being very shareable as well as slick. It's very easy to set up five to ten cascading calendars so that your class schedule is in one, meetings in another, and personal dates in one more, so that one can be shared with certain people and others kept private. Also, it's very simple to embed the calendar into web pages and export the content for other applications if needed.

Adwords and Adsense

Two halves of the same product, adwords and adsense are what generates most of google's revenue. Adwords is a program that allows you to advertise your business to web users through the sponsored links you'll find in most of Google's services as well as sprinkled liberally through the internet. Adsense allows owners of websites or blogs to make money by publishing those same ads on their sites. I'll be adding a new post shortly about adwords since to me, it's something that I think all business owners should be aware of, so I'll leave it at that but encourage you to check it out.

Shannon Smadella's Website

2008-03-17T13:27:00.002-06:00

Another site launched today: www.shannonsmadella.com. Shannon is competing in the Miss Universe Canada pageant this year in the hopes of being Canada's representative in the Miss Universe competition.

Her site is simple and sharp, full of photography taken by Celestial Photography. Good luck Shannon, Saskatoon is supporting you!

Mashed Bananas launched

2008-03-03T20:12:00.002-06:00

Well, it's been busy here at Saskatoon Web Design. Quite a few sites will be launched in the next few weeks. The first one of March is www.mashedbananas.ca. Mashed Bananas is an online boutique of fresh, flirty, and modern brands of products for new moms, babies, children, and the home.

The core of this website is osCommerce, a free and open source e-commerce solution. As a designer, I like the fact that osCommerce has about 12, 000 active stores across the world and a huge community devoted to improving the product. We've employed about a half dozen 'mods' to the mashed bananas store to customize the experience and add the features needed. Just about every graphical feature of the base application has been replaced by custom designed images. And best of all, the store owner is capable of adding, deleting, managing her products, inventory, coupons, newsletters, and much more without the help of her web designer.

For as much as I'm a fan of work, I also acknowledge that many clients would prefer to save some money and take a hands on approach to their operation. They then become more knowledgeable about their store, its operation, and their needs, all of which is only good for business.

O IN ONE website launched

2008-01-28T14:50:00.000-06:00

This week, O IN ONE's redesigned website and online store has launched. View the golf clothing and accessories store. O IN ONE is the brainchild of a Saskatoon based entrepreneur, selling golf shirts and other accessories. The shirts sport a unique hole in the collar to hold sunglasses or carabina clips.

Open Source Solutions

2008-01-14T20:39:00.000-06:00

I'm a big fan of efficiency. Same with the idea of core competencies. Also with saving money. Those three things also happen to be reasons that I'm a big fan of open source solutions when they're available.

What is open source?

Open Source solutions are programs or applications whose code is "open". This means that anyone may alter the code for their own specific uses and distribute it for free. This approach to software differs from the big players in the computer world who prefer all of their products to be proprietary. Good luck making a change to Microsoft Word and offering the new 'improved' version to your friends over the internet.

What are the benefits?

Cost for one. With Open Source solutions, you don't pay for the software yourself. I often recommend open source E-commerce applications because cost-wise, they are great value in comparison with most proprietary applications. Usually a packaged ecommerce shopping cart system will be at least $1000, and if it is custom built for you, it goes up from there very fast. Even with the packaged products, you (or your designer) will still need to re-template it so that it aligns with your organization's image.

Features is another reason. Think about wikipedia for a moment. It has over 7 million articles in over a hundred languages. It's free. How? Because it harnessed the labour of a great many people, and didn't have to pay any of them a penny. Now, of course, there have been instances where articles have been wrong, but as a user you're encouraged to be a critical and active participant yourself, not a silent consumer of information.

Open Source software works on similar principles in that anyone can contribute. Of course, as a user of the software, you don't need to use other peoples contributions. For example, osCommerce has shipping packages for most countries, but if you do business in Saskatoon, you'll likely use just the official Canada Post package. You can pick and choose what works for your situation, and only choose those contributions that are working for other people already.

When wouldn't you use OpenSource?

If you had a very specific need and are willing to pay to see it fulfilled. Then you'll likely want to hire a web programmer to create a tailor made solution and a web designer to ensure it looks good. The same goes if a pre-packaged solution is a perfect fit and the price is right for you. Then go ahead. Admittedly, it isn't too often that I find software that does exactly what I want it too, yet I still have the Adobe and Microsoft family of products on all of my computers because they're close enough and good enough to pay the money for them (no small amount of money either).

New Website Launched!

2008-01-01T20:56:00.000-06:00

To help bring in the New Year, I've redesigned Saskatoon Web Design. The old site was serviceable, but not quite as sleek as I would have liked. Feel free to email me with your thoughts on the new look.

Website Redesigns

How often should a website be redesigned? It depends upon the site of course, but I think a good rule of thumb is every two or three years. Of course, a well designed site can last for longer than that, but generally speaking once a website turns 5 or 6, its age starts to show, even if its still functional and usable.

Gender equality in Web Design

2007-12-15T00:59:00.000-06:00

The staff at A List Apart (quite honestly the best web design zine I know of) just recently released the results from their massive annual survey conducted amongst new media professionals (web designers, developers, webmasters, etc). There is a lot of data, and you can view their analysis here (pdf file, 1.6mb). I'll write a few posts about things that surprised me.

Gender demographics
83% of web professionals are men. Despite the fact that most computer related occupations share a similar statistic, I thought that it would be a little different in this field.

First off, a good number of the respondents' job titles were: web designer (19.9%), designer (10.4%), or creative director (5.4%). Unlike other responses, such as developer, webmaster, information architect, these titles suggest a "left brain" approach to the web. Typically, women are well represented in other artistic or creative fields.

Second, this industry has a very high rate of self-employed/freelance individuals (23.4%). Again, this is the type of employment that is well suited to those who crave a positive work-life balance: a factor that is often more important to women than men.

Typically, the barriers to entry in this industry are quite low. Higher education can often provide a great starting point for a career, but I suppose a prerequisite that overshadows that is an active interest and familiarity with computers.

Even more than an interest though is the approach. To use an example: the hard core gaming industry (a very male focused business) encourages not just participation amongst customers, but also modifications to the games themselves. Boys and young men learn how to script AI, create electronic models, and design experiences through these games. They are empowered and rewarded for it.

Games targeted at women are still few and far between, but those that lend themselves well to broader audiences prefer to offer intuitive interfaces that hide the mechanics so as not to confuse or scare away the audience. While this may make them more attractive to casual users, it may also be doing a disservice to them as then the customers are taught to become receptive and not active participants. They are reliant on the developers to incorporate things they'd like to see and are taught to wait patiently for that to happen rather than being given the tools to do it themselves.

Web Promotion Campaigns

2007-12-02T23:07:00.000-06:00

In this post, I'll go through some of the common elements of an online promotion campaign for a typical small/medium business website. First off though, let's talk about the goals of a campaign:

Increase search engine ranking (ex. PageRank in Google): some people view this as the end goal of a campaign, but in reality, it's the starting point. Because being number one on Google doesn't make you any money on its own.
Increased website traffic: goal number one will help this, but there are other ways to increase traffic than just through search engines. Again though, visitors alone don't pay for your time, unless if you're selling your traffic (to advertisers of your own), but most small businesses don't fall into that category.
Increase leads, inquiries, or sales. Here lies the true reason for starting a promotion campaign, to increase the number of people interesting in purchasing your goods and services.

How do we go from 1 to 3? Let's start with the search engine rankings and some examples of activities that will improve your standing:

Search Engine Ranking
Search engines are enigmatic beasts. Sometimes it's hard to tell why one site is listed before another. That being said, there are some factors that will your affect business' ranking on the major engines:

Backlinks (links from other sites to yours), links are rating according to their reputation (think Harvard vs. Lakeland College), relevancy to your site, and quantity.
Content: search engines want their users to find useful information. If you don't have any on your site, they'll give their users someone else's site instead.
Size and age of your site, older, larger sites are better.

So, the actions to be taken are: increase the quality and quantity of both the content on your website and the backlinks to it. Directory submissions are a low cost way of increasing backlinks, and blogs are fantastic for increasing the amount of content you have. Backlinks can also be purchased or exchanged with partner sites that are complementary.

Another important element of your campaign is to be strategic. All of the content on your page should be reviewed to emphasize the words you want people to find you by (ex. web design and search engine optimization are words you'll see all over my site). Try to think of unique words as well to get an edge on your competitors. For example, and this was accidental, my site is ranked on the first page of google when you type in "the invisible movie saskatoon", likely because that phrase doesn't appear all that often online. Now, you'll probably want more relevant keywords as I doubt the guy looking for the invisible movie found it on my site.

Website Traffic
Improving your search engine ranking is a great first step towards your final goals and will increase the traffic coming to your website. There are other more targeted ways to increase that traffic.

One is of course advertising, both online and off. There are millions of other webmasters that will gladly take your money in return for showing one of your ads on their page. The tricky part again is to pick those that will ultimately provide a return on the investment.

Email marketing is another method. If you have an email list and are coming out with a new product or promotion, then letting your past customers know about it while directing them to your website for more detailed information is a very affordable way to increase traffic from the best kind of visitor: ones that have already been loyal to your business.

Interactivity is of course a strength of the internet, and having a site that allows it can keep visitors coming back to your website. Blogs with comment fields, forums, discussion boards are examples. Unfortunately, you do need a critical mass of visitors for this to be effective, otherwise you risk looking a little silly if your only discussion board item is a welcome message.

Sales, leads, business
Ultimately, the point of the above is to capture business (some campaigns may be focused solely on brand building or value adding, but I would posit that these activities as well have the end goal of providing a product or service). If you aren't operating an e-commerce site, and even if you are, it is important to query your customers in a non-intrusive way to find out how they discovered your business. Keep track of that information!

The really annoying thing about any type of marketing is trying to figure out when it's working. Some things can be measured (pagerank, search engine position, website traffic, emails, etc) but others can't (goodwill, billboard exposure, reputation). The factors that you can pin down, should be, and analyzed so that you have an idea as to what the effect of the money and time you spend on your marketing is. Some businesses spend the money and hope it works out, others choose not to make the investments in the first place, the sweet spot of course is somewhere in the middle.

Voice over Internet Phones

2007-11-29T02:28:00.000-06:00

Potential Savings for Small Businesses

Voice over Internet Protocol or VOIP is a phone line running over your internet connection. Many larger corporations and institutions are making the switch, and it's worthwhile for small businesses to think about it as well.

I use vonage, but there are a lot of options, depending on where you live. In most cities in Canada you can transfer your existing phone number to a VOIP line.

Misconceptions

Before delving into the issue, I'd like to just mention that first of all, VOIP has improved A LOT over the past few years. There can still be issues with sound quality, but by and large, it's comparable to a phone line (which can also have issues with sound quality). Also, you don't need to have your computer running in order to use your phone, and you can certainly use a "normal" phone assuming it's relatively new. Some people are concerned that they'll have to use a headset and microphone, and sit down at their computer to answer any call, don't worry, you don't have to.

Advantages

Number one: cost. Especially for multiple lines, long distance, and extra features. Packages start as low as $15 a month with free long distance and the normal features you'd expect (voice mail, call waiting, etc). Land lines can't compete on that front.

Number two: additional lines. Extra lines are equally affordable and the big bonus is you can purchase numbers from other areas and forward them to your main line. I started my business in Edmonton before I moved to Saskatoon, and I still have my Edmonton number. 1-800 numbers are also easily added to your package.

Number three: voicemail accessible from your email. If you're traveling, you can still receive your voicemails. If you're really industrious, you can also bring your adapter with you and make calls from your line if you have an internet connection.

Disadvantages

Power outages: if you loose power, or your internet connection, you loose your phone line. Calls will go to voicemail, but won't be able to make outgoing calls (including 9-1-1!). It helps to have friendly neighbours.

Internet connection speed: if you have a poor/slow internet connection, the quality of your phone line may suffer. I end up using my phone line savings to buy a faster internet connection, but considering my business (web design), I'd likely pay for faster internet anyways. Your situation may be different.

Phone jacks: all of those well placed phone jacks around your house just became a lot less useful. Unless if you're willing to rewire them, or add adapters to each one, you'll have to either set up a wireless phone system or make do with a single phone jack beside your adapter. I personally just use the one jack, but have a wireless phone set with three charging stations and three cordless phones.

Does a small business need a website?

2007-11-22T17:46:00.000-06:00

According to the BBC, the Federation of Small Businesses in the UK claims that half of small to medium sized businesses in their country lack a web presence. The article presents the rhetorical question: Do small firms really need a website?

Of course, by the end of the article the answer is yes, of course. The why of it is more interesting, so I’ll speak to that. Again according to the article, “new technologies fundamentally alter consumer behaviour”. What has changed in our behaviour as consumers since the Internet age began?

As part of a trend that may or may not be caused solely by the internet, the pace of decisions has been sped up. What has been precipitated by the internet is our expectation that access to information be immediate. Imagine writing a letter to Sears today about a new product in their catalogue, and getting your hockey sweater three months later.

If for example, I am researching electrical contractors at 2 a.m. I only have two sources of information: a 1 X 3 inch Yellowpage ad and the internet. Perhaps there was a time when a consumer would be willing to go to bed, wait for the next day, find a copy of the Buy and Sell, or chat with friends at work on Monday, but we’ve grown accustomed to information being available instantly. Any contractor that has an online photo gallery of past work and testimonials is a leg up on another who lacks a website and is reliant on a phone call.

Website, especially for small businesses are a great leveler in the marketplace. Advertising in other media can be expensive, but websites don’t have to be. The only small businesses that can forgo cost effective ways of communicating to customers are businesses that either won’t be in business for long, or aren’t looking to either expand their business or offer a higher level of service to their existing customers. In any competitive marketplace, it doesn’t take long before the latter become the former.

High fidelity testing (i.e. how to save time and money)

2007-11-21T00:57:00.000-06:00

High fidelity testing is a fancy term for low tech and high idea design work. Ideally, before anyone approaches a computer, stakeholders or focus groups get together, discuss, and create a website on paper. Poor ideas can be discarded or reworked before significant time and effort is put into them. Sounds reasonable, but this step is often missed in design cycles.

So what is high fidelity testing in practice? One example is the card sort method. In this exercise groups of people take a pile of index or recipe cards. On each card they write out a single hypothetical page of the website and organize them into categories or menu items. Each group then discusses their final site and collaboratively comes out with one that incorporates the best of everyone’s.

The discussion should focus on putting yourself in your user’s shoes. Imagine yourself as a target client (or even better, organize a focus group of target audiences), and individually look at each page title. Ask yourself the following questions:

Does this title make sense to me? Surprisingly, a lot of website include a vocabulary that reflects the author and not the reader. Each title should speak directly to the audience in some way.
Would I click on this?
Are there any pages at this menu level that I expect or want to see that aren’t here? One golden rule is that if you’ve “sold” your customer on your product, there had better be a way for them to express that within a click (i.e. don’t make it hard for people to give you money).

Once this exercise is done, you can go through your new sitemap and flesh out each page. Then, your team will be ready to start designing the site, knowing how many pages you’re creating and what kind of assets you’ll need to communicate your key messages (photos, animations, videos, text, etc.).

Cost of a Web Site

2007-11-18T12:50:00.000-06:00

A common question asked and often not answered among web designers is: what is the cost of a website. This is a complicated question as there are a lot of factors, custom web design work isn't like the retail industry with clearly defined price points. Below, I'll go through a few of the factors, and then, even go into the hard numbers.

Hard Costs

These costs are pretty fixed, there are certain things you need to host a website that can't be avoided:

Domain name: from $15-35/year
Host: from $5 to thousands per month, depending on the traffic and services. For example if you are hosting a direct to drive movie service, with tens of thousands of users, this won't be cheap. For most businesses this cost will be closer to $10-$30/month.

Preproduction

This is the stage before your site itself is made.

Photography: both the purchase of stock images and hiring a photographer can be expensive. This could be anywhere from $0 to thousands, but I'd recommend setting aside a few hundred dollars if you don't already have high quality images to work with.
Content writing: some clients save money by creating their own content, otherwise budget $25-$50 a page.
Copy editing: if you do provide your own text, you'll still want your designer to proof it, and ensure it's "web-ready". Likely only a few hours work, so $50 is another safe budget.
Video: if you need to shoot video for flash movies on your website, much like photography, the cost varies depending on what you need.
High fidelity testing and focus groups: The most important part of preproduction is trying to minimize wasted production time. Focus groups and surveys are a great way of ensuring all of the elements you want in your website are desired by your users. Costs can go from $0-$1000 depending availability of participants, space rentals, meals, and of course analysis of the results.

Production

Now is where the real work begins.

Design: a small site may take 10 hours of work, a large one 100 hours. Designers charge anywhere from $15/hr for inexperienced freelancers to $100/hr or more for industry leading professionals. For a typical small business site, you can budget $600 for this section.
Image manipulation/optimization: depending on the amount of images, this could be a couple hours to hundreds for large projects. Again, for a small business $100-$200 worth of time should be sufficient.
Testing: often included in the design component, your site should be tested extensively against many types of browsers, computers, small screen devices (cell phones, etc) to ensure it performs adequately.

Post-Production

Websites require a continuing investment of time and money. They lose value if left on their own and even small websites should be updated with some regularity.

Surveys: once your site is up, solicit feedback to ensure it's effective. Your design studio can manage this campaign, or you can do it informally with your clients.
Promotion: to get your site noticed on the internet it takes either time, money, or both. You can spend as little or as much as you'd like on this aspect depending on your business needs.
Maintenance: keeping your site functional is of course important. A well designed site should maintain its look for a few years, but nevertheless it is a good idea to have someone available should any issues arise.
Content: whenever possible, content should be kept up to date and fresh, otherwise you shouldn't expect much return traffic to your site.

Extras

The internet has a huge number of opportunities for businesses. If you want to go above a basic brochure like site, consider budgeting for something extra:

Flash elements: Flash offers a rich experience to users if done well. It is of course more time consuming to make than a HTML based element, so of course it will add to the design cost of your project.
Content Management System: If you'd like to be able to update your site yourself, without web programming experience, then consider a CMS. They are often more expensive than a standard site, but they will reduce the cost of maintenance, since you'll be able to post your own information without a developers help.
E-commerce: from having an Ebay store, to setting up your own merchant account, secure website, online inventory, and payment system, the cost of an e-commerce application can range from a few hundred dollars to set up to many thousands.

Summary

The above might be nice to read, but may not answer your question: how much will my website cost? Here are a couple examples, all hypothetical:

Christminster Church: a local church making a site with monthly updates to post upcoming events for their members. Total: $935

Domain name and host: $150/year.
Content and Photography provided by church.
Copy editing and image optimization: $75.
Design of 5 page website: $300.
Monthly updates provided to designer: $30/month = $360/year
Limited web promotion: $50.

Sam's Autobody: a small business that wants a basic site to generate leads for real world business. Total: $1175

Domain name and host: $150/year.
Content provided by client.
Photography: $100.
Copy editing and image optimization: $75.
Design of 8 page site: $400.
Web promotion: $200.
Flash image gallery: $250.

Of course, you can also contact me and I'll write you up a personalized quote.

Setting up a Saskatchewan Business, part 1

2007-11-18T01:48:00.000-06:00

Preparation

Before you get into any nitty gritty, the first step is to step back. Analyze your idea, yourself, and your market. Is this what you want to do? Will people pay you money to do it?

Next up, who is your competition? Take your time, make lists, visit their places of business. Every bit of information you glean now will repay your time tenfold. If after surveying your market, you still think your business idea is sound, rejoice. Otherwise, spend some time tinkering with the plan.

Legalities

Perhaps the least fun but most necessary step in starting your business is registering for all of the necessary permits. This list isn't exhaustive as many types of businesses have specific licence requirements (visit BizPal, an online service to help you find out what kinds of licenses you may need):

Name Registration
Start this early, because first you'll need to do a name search, and only if your requested name is not already used will you be able to purchase the business name. Visit Saskatchewan Justice for more info.
GST License, from Revenue Canada
PST vendor's license, from Saskatchewan Justice
Business liscence from your municipality

If you are starting a corporation there are additional forms to be completed, such as your articles of incorporation.

Necessities

Once you have your business name secured, and all necessary licenses, you can start to arrange for the other necessities of running a business, such as:

Bank account
Merchant Account (to receive debit/credit payment)
Phone line and email address
Website domain name (even if you haven't begun working on the website, secure your domain name early once you know your business name)
Business Cards
Promotional material such as brochures, leaflets, power point presentations, etc.
An adequate filing system
A solid accounting system, set this up before you start making purchases and receiving payment.
Odds and saws: letterhead, stationary, etc.

Analyzing Link Partners

2007-11-18T00:15:00.000-06:00

So you have a website. You’re also bright enough to realize that it isn’t going to do you any good if no one is visiting it. So you’ve set yourself a goal to find online partners to exchange links with, or you have a budget set aside to purchase links online.

Prioritize

Very quickly you’ll realize there are a thousand different opportunities out there and more people willing to take your money than you have money to give. You need to separate the great from the good and the good from the bad. Here’s a quick list of questions to get you started:

How relevant is this site? There will be a few criteria, such as geography, products, approach, all compared to your own site.

How respectable is this site? Sometimes this is tough to determine, but often amateurish or poorly designed sites stand out.

What do the search engines think of this site? Visit an online tool such as iwebtool to see the PageRank of the site. Obviously the higher the better.

How much traffic does the site get (and more specifically the page where your link will appear)? You’ll have to depend on the webmaster’s word, but it’s still a worthwhile question to ask before you spend any serious money.

In short, the money you spend on your online presence can and should be well spent. Not all sites are created equal, so be picky. Look for relevant sites that stand a good chance of bringing solid business leads to your website as well as boost your PageRank.

Follow Up

Finally, before you renew any packages from a site that sells links, check your website statistics and ensure that you have been getting enough traffic to justify the cost. Also of course, ask your new clients how they heard about you, the tricky part about marketing is that it's so hard to tell what expenditures are worthwhile. But it gets even harder to know if you don't ask.

How to Get Banned from Google

2007-11-17T13:24:00.000-06:00

Search engine optimization and online website promotion is incredibly important to creating a successful website. There are however pitfalls to avoid as you build your online network. Google does watch for certain behaviours and, if caught, an offending website can see a dramatic drop in its PageRank or even worse, it could be banned from the index altogether. In this article we’ll go through some of the major ones you’ll want to avoid.

There are lots of fish in the sea

When picking link partners, be cautious. Avoid link farms: sites with thousands of unrelated links but no content. Google will assign a value to any link to your site based on the quality of the site it’s coming from. Link farms are often banned altogether. Online directories are a different story. They are often focused in the links they carry, for example: Saskatoon small business; web designers; freelance graphic artists; etc. Google acknowledges these directories as different from the link farms.

Black Hat SEO

Search engine optimization used to be a black art with every web designer guessing what every search engine was ranking site on. The rules change regularly, but search engines have been more open in what they like to see and what they don’t. I’ll talk about the don’ts here.

Using invisible links, i.e. making the text colour the same as the background.

Keyword stuffing: it’s expected that you’ll emphasize your keywords in your website, but many go overboard and repeat all 50 keywords in every alt tag of each image, in the meta tag of each page, and anywhere else they can put extra words without them appearing on the screen.

Automated backlink generation: there are a lot of programs and services available that will search the internet for buttons that say “submit link”, “add a link”, etc., and then automatically fill in your website’s address and description. This can produce a huge number of backlinks in a short period of time. Google will notice, but not in the good way.

Leaving your site to die. Websites are organic entities and if you don’t look after them, they’ll slowly get older, outdated, and less useful to the general public. While this won't get you banned, it might as well, since your pagerank will drop slowly but surely.

Why Build a Website

2007-11-17T13:19:00.000-06:00

By Robert Blizzard

Though some may respond to such a question with “Well, why not?”, the continuing investment of time and money to have a meaningful web presence demands a better answer. I’ll offer three to start us off, even though there are many more.

Meet organizational goals
Increase Professionalism
Visibility & Promotion

Goals

Before deciding on embarking on a web project, a moment should be spent on seeing what you hope to accomplish with it. It is best to view the Internet like any other marketing medium, perhaps it has more potential and functionality, but it will not provide an immediate return on investment if you’re not sure why you need it. For example, a local community garden would not find a full page ad in a national newspaper to be an effective use of resources. Similarly, a flash-driven, web database of what is growing in the garden would also be a poor use of resources.

But perhaps that garden is always looking for new community members who want to be a part of the organization. Maybe the fact that they are volunteer run makes it hard for members to receive updates and information. These are the types of challenges that can be met by an effective web presence.

Having defined goals which you expect a website to help you attain is not only a solid organizational practice to begin with, it is also a necessity to maximize the value you receive from the investment you’ll make.

Professionalism

Within minutes, anyone is now capable of creating a MySpace page, a personal blog, or any number of other template based websites. What differentiates a professional organization for “anyone” is a commitment to quality. Generally speaking, the smaller the organization, the more important it is that all promotional material, literature, brochures, etc, including websites, be as professional as possible.

Having a website with information about your company increases your credibility with clients, donors, and customers. In much the same way that a contractor is benefited by having a physical office that a customer can return to if they have any concerns, an organization is benefited by having a 24 hour a day point of information and contact through the web.

Promotion

Web sites are not promotional/marking campaigns. They can however be very powerful elements of one. A bookmark with nothing but a website makes for a great giveaway. A website in the signature line of every email you send makes every piece of correspondence a marketing tool. Just like the old strategy of stuffing extra leaflets into envelopes to maximize the value of postage, the url of your organization in the space of 12 characters can become a gateway to a host of information.

Search Engine Optimization

2007-11-17T13:18:00.000-06:00

By Robert Blizzard

Your domain name: there is a reason speculators have bought up hundreds of thousands of .com names. Because the words that appear in your domain name are a head start in getting your website found by a search engine.

Tips:

Incorporate your keywords
Keep it as short as you can
Make it memorable

Use every opportunity

At this point, search engines still can’t analyze images. This means that it is the words on your website that matter. Be sure to take every opportunity, whether it is in the name of your images, the meta tags for your html documents, or descriptions of your links, to reinforce your keywords.

Not everything is equal

Search engines will give more weight to some words than others. The title of your web pages, for example, is one of the most important as the engine will assume it is the best description of your site. The same applies to the header tags, or items appearing higher up on you page.

Tip:
Use CSS based layout so that the content is loaded before your navigation system. The style sheet will ensure that each appear where they should, but in the HTML document, the content comes first. You don’t want the first thing a search engine sees to be “Home”, “About Us”, and so on.

Outside your site

The biggest difference in your search engine results will come not from what’s on your site, but what’s on other people’s sites. Most search engines, and Google especially, care most about how many backlinks there are to your site, and the quality of them.

A backlink is a link to your website from someone else’s. High profile websites (universities, news organizations, etc.) are deemed more important than others (such as your MySpace page). To create backlinks, submit your site to web directories, offer to provide a link on your site, and write blogs or articles for other websites.

Search engine optimization is the easy part, just make sure you’re taking advantage of your opportunities. The work intensive part is to create a network of links that lead internet users to you. That takes time and effort.

6 Steps to Creating a Website

2007-11-17T13:08:00.000-06:00

By Robert Blizzard

Step 1: Why?

The first and most important step when creating a website, or having another person do it for you, is to spend some time deciding why you want one. A lot of time and money can be wasted if you don’t have a clear idea of what you’d like to achieve with your web presence.
Examples of goals for a website:

Leads for your business

Information for your customers

Community for your members

Step 2: What?

Once you’ve decided what you want your site to do, the next step is to decide what information you’ll need to achieve those goals. Before writing the copy, or choosing images though, it’s a good idea to create a sitemap that will define, down to the page, what will be in your website.

Example sitemap:

Home

Products

Used

Testimonials

Contact

Now that you know where the information is going, the hard part of actually writing the content down starts. Keep your content short. Users are unlikely to read more than three lines beneath a heading. Be sure that you make every word count.

Step 3: Layout and Design

This is where you may need professional help. You’ve all the pieces at this point, you just need to put the puzzle together in an attractive way. There are decisions to be made at this juncture, like whether your site will incorporate Flash, what screen resolution it will support, and the colour scheme.

Step 4: Getting Online

By now you’ll have a working website, but no one can see it if it’s in your My Documents folder. You’ll need both a domain name and a host. Take your time choosing a domain name, as it will be central to your marketing (on and offline) for as long as you keep it. Exercise caution too when picking a company to host your website. There are many to choose from, but I like to filter down to a local company that I can actually visit if I need to.

Step 5: Promotion

I’d like to say you’re almost done, but an online presence is going to involve an ongoing commitment. Right away, your site might as well still be sitting in your My Documents folder since no one out there will know it exists. You’ll need to submit it to business listings, search engines, and online directories to generate traffic. You’ll also need other websites to add links to yours. This is best done, not all at once, but a little at a time.

Step 6: Maintenance

If you’d like people to return to your website, you’ll also need to maintain it. New content, special promotions, and the occasional redesign will keep your website from gathering dust.

Accessing the Marginalized

2007-11-17T13:04:00.000-06:00

By Robert Blizzard

According to a survey by a British telecom regulator, reported by the BBC, just over a quarter of people over 65 have home internet access. This pales in comparison to younger age groups.

How does this finding affect web designers and organizations that use the web as a primary medium of information delivery? Though we cannot put more computers in the homes of others ourselves, we can strive to make the web experiences they have easier. Two key points of the survey was that many groups new to the Internet are intimidated by it, and do not believe that it is worth their time to learn how to interact with it.

Both of these issues can be mediated by solid design principles. When it comes to making a website more accessible to those groups that are not heavy users, intuitive designs are more important that edgy ones, even conventional ones.

Defy Convention

For example, any typical Internet user knows to click on a logo in the top-left of a webpage to get to the main homepage. This is due to convention, and is meaningless to someone with little Internet experience. A button clearly labeled “Home” will be of better use.

Text size is another area where groups may be marginalized. More and more websites are providing a large or small font selection on their pages, but why force a user to choose the larger size on every different site they visit. A user with impaired vision will have their browser set to a larger font size, and it is up to the designers to provide relative rather than absolute font sizes in their style sheets. The challenge is to create designs which will still be aesthetic with font sizes larger than 8 or 9 pixels.

Where to go from here...

The greater challenge is to create content and services which will draw previously excluded groups to the Internet because they feel there is value for them. Hopefully that challenge will be met by those groups themselves and one by one more people of every type join the online community.