Underground Web Designs Blog

What does the internet mean?

A quick google search will turn up several definitions, all along the same lines: 

Internet: A global network; an interconnection of large and small networks around the world.

Now, that may be what the internet is but that’s not what the internet means. When you think of the internet, do you think of a network of computers that spans the entire world? That may be part of it, but that’s definitely not all the internet is. The internet means much more than just a global network. The internet means easy, immediate access to anything. It means communicating with friends and family around the world in the blink of an eye. It means ordering what I want in 5 minutes from my office chair, and either downloading it right away or having it delivered a few days later.

If you’re in business and have a website, how does your website match with this “instant gratification” definition of the internet? Are you helping people find what they want, when they want it? Or are you trying to sell them something they don’t want? Does it take them a long time to find what you sell — or worse yet, to buy it once they’ve found it? Do you even know what your customers want?

In order to be successful online, you have to understand how people see the internet and work with them. Help them find the information they want quickly, easily, and simply. Make your product available to the people who are looking for it, but don’t annoy those who don’t. Interact, communicate, and listen.

What definition of the internet does your website follow? Are you still looking to reach everybody? Or do you provide exactly what a small niche is looking for?

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. –William Gibson

As someone who makes the online world his business, I can tell you that that quote is just as true now as it was when science fiction writer William Gibson uttered it many years ago. The internet is evolving every day, and the future is indeed friendly.

What is that future? The web of the future is all about openness and a single, unified user experience. In many ways the science fiction writers have had it right all along. As an increasing number of our everyday devices gain internal computers, the lines between the internet and the desktop, and indeed even the online world and the offline world, are beginning to blur.

The web is rapidly moving from something we use, to something we’re part of. Blackberys, iPhones, and PDA’s allow us to bring our internet connection with us as never before. Cell phones keep us connected to co-workers while at home, at work, and on the road. And the internet allows us to buy our cloths, plan our vacations, and communicate with others from wherever we are, whenever we feel like it. Lately, such products as Adobe AIR and Yahoo Searchmonkey promise to bring the web even closer to us, by putting it on the desktops of our computers and making it easier than ever to find the information we seek. Likewise, projects like OpenID, OAuth and others are working tirelessly to help us manage our increasingly digital identities.

As the web moves closer and closer to the dreams of science fiction writers the world over, how will your business adapt? Is your website ready? The evolving internet is all about continual interaction. There are no longer any lines between locations or between devices. The internet IS. Is your business ready to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity? Success on the new internet will go to those who are avaialble whenever and wherever their customers may look for them. It will go to those who can offer a complete and total experience that transcends the online world and encompases digital information, interaction, and physical products.

Apple is already doing this. Their computers, iPods, and now the iPhone all continue the unique, easy to use experience that the Apple website, software, and Apple Stores provide.

The next generation is growing up constantly connected to the internet. What are you doing to unify your products, services, and brand into one simple to use yet powerful experience that will make an impression on them?

If you have a small business and don’t have a squidoo lens, you’re missing out on website traffic and recognition. What the heck is squidoo? I’ll let them explain that. 

The important thing to realize is that squidoo is an easy way to interact with your audiance in a very “Web 2.0″ way. Squidoo lets you publish information on your area of expertise and include pictures, links, RSS feeds from relevant blogs (possibly your own?), polls, etc. You can let your guests rank different links for usefulness, and include a guest-book to get their feedback. 

It’s fun, and it really is incredibly easy. What have you got to loose? Take an hour or so and build your first lens. Then share it with everybody. It definitely won’t HURT your business.

And while you’re at it, check out mine: http://www.squidoo.com/modxforsmallbusiness

Today Yahoo! announced that their developer platform “SearchMonkey” is open to developers. SearchMonkey allows developers to write applications that will provide users with custom search results based on RDF data.

Put simply, RDF is a way of communicating data about your website or business in a way that computers understand. This can be anything from who maintains your website and when it was last updated to your store address and hours, to movie reviews. This is your chance to provide searchers with extra data about your site.

It’s true that Yahoo isn’t Google, and that only people searching Yahoo! using these customized applications will be able to see your data, BUT this is still a tremendous opportunity. Yahoo may be the first big player to start paying attention to RDF data in a big way, but it is far from the last. Google is exploring RDF data too through it’s Google Base program.

If you want to jump ahead in the next generation of search results, this is your chance. Usually search engines don’t put the content of the search results in the hands of developers, but now they have. If you don’t take advantage of it, be sure your competitors will!

If you want to make use of RDF data to describe your business but don’t know where to start, please contact us about creating an RDF profile or application for your site that is compatible with the new Yahoo! SearchMonkey. 

In the old days of the web, every web page was pretty much the same. Flash animations, scripting, and even graphics were few and far between because of bandwidth and technology limits. Now, all that’s changed. Internet speeds just keep getting faster, and graphics, flash, and internet applications are becoming more and more widespread.

In fact, so much has changed that a simple HTML website just isn’t competitive anymore. People expect a site that’s updated regularly and often, that has maps, a search bar, and cool interactive menu.

If you’re selling something, they expect to be able to check out quickly and easily, with the site doing everything possible to make it easier for them. Users expect user reviews, ratings, and “people who bought this product also bought” listings for each product.

If you write a blog or an information site, people expect to be able to comment or leave some sort of feedback on the information you provide.

 

The days when a simple HTML web page was enough are gone. Is your website still in the dark ages?

 

 

There isn’t one. Now get back to work!

 

 

 

No one denys the wisdom of diversifying your investments. By investing your money in several different ways, in different places, you may not be guaranteed a good return, but your chances of loosing everything suddenly are drastically reduced. 

The same could be said for your website.

Most business owners put up a website because they expect it to help them make money. Unfortunately, many people don’t use (or just don’t know about) all the ways that their website could be making them money. Because of this their website is like a single investment in only one company. It’s great if that investment does well, but if it goes bankrupt you’re going to loose money.

Instead of placing all your eggs in one basket, look at these other options your website might be able to use to bring in some extra money and diversify your web presence:

• Google Adsense and onsite advertising.
• Affiliate programs.
• Online contests
• Forums and community sites (with ads).
• An e-mail mailing list or RSS feed.
• A free give-away with a powerful upsell.
• Social media (youtube, facebook, delicious, etc)

You’ll notice that not everything on that list will make you money by itself. The biggest key to being successful online is not to focus only on money, but to diversify your efforts. Have a strong focus, and then try many things to accomplish your goal and build your brand. By spreading out your efforts to gain traffic, build your brand, and yes, make money you may not become an overnight millionaire, but chances are you’ll slowly build a successful site.

When running a bricks and mortar business your marketing options are limited by time, manpower, and cost. Online you have much more freedom to explore different ways of advertising your business, making passive revenue, and communicating with your market. So do a bit of research and try something new. You may be surprised at the results.

(Watch future articles for more details on setting up an affiliate program, google adsense, and more).

Everybody knows that you should color coordinate your wardrobe in order too look your best. Don’t wear clashing colors, pick one or two colors that complement each other, etc. In the same way that you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing socks in sandals *chuckle* you should be sure that each of the various components of your website match. I’m not talking about just each of the pages on your site — I”m talking about every step of the process ANYBODY could use to interact with you online.

In order for your website to fulfill it’s full potential every part of it should match. This includes the shopping cart, your affiliate program (if you have one), your e-mail campaigns, any videos you do, and even your advertising. In the offline world this is known as branding, and is practiced by nearly every company. Sadly, many websites are strongly lacking in branding. Even if you paid for a professional, brandable theme for your home page, you may have still kept the default theme in everything else, such as your shopping cart, which hurts your branding efforts (not to mention conversions).

Imagine you’re shopping at a large online retailer. Their site looks very professional, with a color scheme of blacks and blues. You like the site and browse around for a while until you find something you like. You click “Add to cart” and it suddenly looks like you’re on a totally different site! Everything is white and orange! Are you going to be quite as eager to give up your credit card number and make the purchase now?

How can you stop this from happening to you? First, ask your web designer if he’s familiar with the shopping cart system you plan on using, or the forum software, affiliate software, etc. If you don’t yet know what software you want to use, ask your designer if what he/she recommends. If your designer is familiar with the other software you plan on using he/she can usually create themes for your other software that match the theme of your website. If your site design is already complete, talk to your designer anyway. They should still have the working files for your design saved somewhere, and from these they can easily build a template for your extra software.

A large part of doing business online is establishing trust. Before someone will do business with you, you have to convince them that you are trustworthy and will give them a fair deal. Without the face to face interaction that an in-person meeting provides, your site has to work extra hard to develop that trust. Take a look around your site for anything that jumps out or looks like it doesn’t belong. Then remove it. Remember that on the internet people are looking for any reason NOT to trust you, and will judge you by the smallest things. For that reason, making each part of your site match will go a long way towards making a customer feel you care about them, and are serious about business.

If you’re in the market for a new website, you may hear the term “accessible” tossed around. Just like a wheel chair accessible building is usable by people who cannot walk, an accessible website is built with those who have disabilities in mind. Though some disabilities prohibit use of the internet at all (paralysis, for example) some disabilities still allow a person to use the internet if certain considerations are taken into account when a website is designed.

Two of the most common disabilities that web designers can compensate for are blindness and colorblindness. Because so much of the internet experience is primarily visual, it is important to take into consideration how someone who has difficulty seeing can interact with your site.

Most colorblind people will be able to navigate most of the internet without trouble, however some sites that look fine to most people can be unendingly frustrating to them. Because colorblind people have trouble seeing one or more colors, using the wrong colors in your website can cause links, text, or background to blend together, resulting in a site that is unreadable, or a menu that disappears to a colorblind person. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to test how your site will look to a colorblind person. Tools such as this one show you how your site looks to people with various types of color blindness.

Outright blindness is a much harder thing to design for. Since blind people cannot read your web page at all, they must rely on programs called “screen readers” to read the text on the screen out loud. Though this may sound straight forward, often it isn’t. For example, screen readers cannot read flash content or text contained in images. It is possible to design a website in such a way that screen readers will still be able to use a site that makes extensive use of images, or even flash (often by having a separate “non flash” site); and yet many sites don’t make use of these work arounds.

When you’re looking for your next website, be sure you specify that you want a fully accessable site so that everyone can access it equaly. In fact, accessability is more than just the right thing to do. Many of the same practices that make your site more friendly to those with disabilities will also help your site be seen better by search engines. This in turn can result in higher rankings and more traffic to your site. As if that weren’t enough incentive, In some regions you may be legaly required to ensure that your site meets minimum accessability guidelines.

Don’t just go with good enough. Making sure your site is easily accessible to everyone can be a powerful compeditive advantage in a mediocre marketplace.

One of the first steps to getting a website is choosing a company to host your site. This process doesn’t have to be hard, and can be made all the easier if you know what to look for. Cheaper is not necessarily better when it comes to web hosting. As you evaluate hosting companies, keep the following five tips in mind:

1. Bandwidth. Get as much bandwidth as you can afford. Bandwidth is the amount of information people can transfer to and from your site in a month. The more bandwidth you have, the more visitors your site can support. If your site runs out of bandwidth your site will “go down” until you purchase more. For small business sites, make sure you have at least a few gigabytes, and watch how much bandwidth you use closely. If you are anywhere over 80% of your bandwidth it’s time to upgrade your hosting package, as a sudden spike in popularity could easily push you over the top and bring down your site.
2. PHP Support. Check to make sure the web hosting package you are looking at comes with PHP support. There are many web softwares (forums, blogging platforms, etc) that are written in PHP. These softwares are often available for free, but will be of no use if your server does not run PHP.
3. Server Uptime. Do some research into the hosting company you are interested in and find out how good their server uptime is. Uptime is simply a measure of what percentage of time a host’s servers operational. Remember that if a server goes down, you won’t loose your website, but nobody will be able to view your site until the server is fixed and running again. For this reason it is important that the server you choose has a high uptime rating. Usually a quick google search using the web host’s name and “uptime” will turn up some comments on whether that host offers good server uptime or not. Don’t host your site with a host that has a poor uptime rating.
4. Add-on Domains, Parked Domains, and Sub-domains. Even if your website is a simple one, you may find yourself wanting to add extra domains (web addresses) in the future. For those that don’t know, parked domains are simply domains that are re-directed to current site. This way you can have two or more web addresses pointing to the same site.Sub-domains allow you to replace the “www” part of your domain with anything you choose, so you can have mail.yourdomain.com, testing.yourdomain.com, or anything else.Finally, add-on domains are almost separate hosting accounts, though they share the same resources as your main account. Add-on domains can be handy for small side-projects that don’t really fit on the main site, but don’t warrant the purchase of an entire new hosting account.
5. e-Mail Accounts. As your business grows you will want to have business e-mail accounts that end in @yourdomain.com and in order to do this you will need to use the e-Mail account features of your web host. Most hosts offer more than enough e-mail accounts with their hosting packages, but check the number anyway. You don’t want to find out after you’ve bought a hosting package that you only get 10 e-Mail accounts with it.

Keep those 5 tips in mind as you shop for web hosting and you will avoid many costly mistakes many new website owners make. Above all, use your common sense. If a deal looks too good to be true (like some of the “free hosting” options out there), it probably is. Your website is worth the time it takes to choose a good host.

UndergroundWebDesigns.com is hosted with Bluehost.com, a solid webhost that I have used for several years with no complaints. They have one of the best hosting deals I’ve seen, excellent uptime, and quick customer service. If you’re in the market for web hosting, I give them my highest recommendations.