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?

I know, I know, everybody’s saying to use this or that social network to promote your business. Well, even though I don’t agree that every business should be using social networking, there are certainly some businesses that should use it, and use it well.

If your business is a local business– you’re offering a local product or service and don’t plan on shipping it all over the world — Facebook is the perfect way to promote it. In fact, a local business is the only type of business I would recommend use Facebook, for three reasons:

1. Local businesses match Facebook’s goals. Facebook is designed to connect you to your friends and let you share with them what you’re doing. If your business is a local thing, you can tie into this friend connection by creating a group for your business and getting friends to join, posting pictures of friends or others using your products, etc.
2. You can capitalize on interaction. Besides connection, Facebook is all about interaction — Who did what, when, and with whom. Use this dynamic to promote your product. Get people talking about you and your business with their friends. Make your business a part of their lives.
3. Make your business comment worthy. Facebook is all about short comments. Wall posts, picture comments, etc. Make sure that what you do is worth commenting on. If nobody comments on your business you will get no benefit from Facebook.

In order to promote anything successfully on Facebook, it has to be interesting to your current friends list. If you start a Facebook group for your business, remember that only your own friends will see it at first. If they find it interesting, it will spread. If they don’t, it will fail. If what you do is of no interest to your own friends, then don’t bother promoting on Facebook. Try something else. But if you can make what you do interesting to your friends — enough that they will comment and interact with you about it — you have the potential to grow a very large business using Facebook.

Now I’m just like the next guy — I won’t comment on just anything. But this whole post was inspired by a local business using Facebook for advertising and promotion. Take a look: Bake Me A Cake. Look at the pictures, read the comments. If you can do this with your business, then promote it using Facebook. If you can’t generate this kind of buzz, don’t waste your time.

Everybody wants better to make their website stand out on Google right? Well what if you could get a link to a map of where your business is located — in Google’s own search results? Think it can’t be done? Check out this live search results page.

Microformats are a way of adding extra data to the HTML on a web page so that both computers and humans can understand what the information means. This could be information about an upcoming event (date, time, location), or a person or business (name, address, email address, etc). In this case, Google is using contact information marked up using the hCard microformat to display an extra link in it’s search results that displays a map of the business’s headquarters.

Now, adding an extra link to the search results is cool, but it’s nothing compared to what can and will be done as microformats become more popular. Because they allow computers to understand the data on your website better, microformats can lead to smarter search engines, better organization of data, and less manual input of information.

The future of the internet revolves around programs doing their own research and sharing information with each-other, and one of the key technologies will be the use of microformats on the web. Best of all, using microformats has never been easier. If you use Wordpress, check out my recently released Micro Anywhere plugin for Wordpress. Install the plugin and you can be adding event and contact information to your pages and posts within minutes.

The internet has done great things by providing access to nearly unlimited information. The next stage of internet evolution will enable software to understand and process this information for us, so that we only see what we want to see, when we want to see it. Will your site be one of the first to make use of this exciting technology on a massive scale?

Automation is a big thing in the manufacturing industry. Factories use robots and other “smart” machines to weave cloth, build cars, and almost everything in between. But automation has just as many applications for the small business as it does for a factory — the difference is that small business don’t know about it, or think it’s too expensive.

Now, I’m not suggesting you purchase a robot to handle the paperwork, but I am suggesting that if we made better use of the computer power we all have on hand to automate certain tasks, our lives could be much less stressful, and much more productive.

Many people can dramatically increase their work efficiency by simply teaching their desktop computers to help them keep organized. E-mail rules and calendar synchronization are great examples. If enough people use a service like Google calendar, you can even subscribe to those that are important, so that your own calendar is always up to date.

One thing I’ve successfully automated has been the synchronization of my cell phone with my computer. Since both my Mac and my phone support Bluetooth, the computer simply connects wirelessly to my phone each day and the two devices update each-other with any changes. This keeps my contacts and calendar updated, without me having to enter the same information in 2 different places.

Or what about our websites? What if you used RSS feeds to put the latest 5 blog posts from your blog on your home page? Or what if you could pull up ANY blog posts on a certain topic, and reference them on your site — without you doing a thing? Both are possible and easy to set up, yet few people use them.

Could you help automate things for your customers as well? Microformats such as hCalendar and hCard allow websites to display event and contact information in a way that both humans and computers can understand. By providing your business’s contact information as an hCard on your “about us” page, you can make it that much easier for those who use hCard enabled web browsers to get in touch with you: instead of having to write anything down one click puts your contact information in their address book!

Next time you sit down at your computer, think about 5 tasks you do every day, and then spend 30 minutes researching how to automate them. They may take some time to set up, but in the long run automation is always well worth the setup time.

At the Webvisions conference I attended a couple weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about microformats and open protocols that would enable the next generation of internet applications to not only share data, but to understand more and more data that resides on ordinary webpages.

Indeed, standards such as microformats are not new, they just haven’t been used too much. Now is, I believe, the time to start changing that. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I’ve been working on creating some plugins for systems already in use so that they can benefit from the use of microformats. Today the first of these plugins was finished, and has been released.

The plugin is an hCalendar plugin for TinyMCE. TinyMCE is the WYSIWYG editor used in many popular content management systems and blogging softwares, including MODx, my CMS of choice, so I hope that by making this plugin available to such a wide audiance, many more people will be able to use microformats on their webpages and in their blogs… even if they don’t fully understand how they work.

The plugin works by opening a dialog box where a user can input event details including the event title, location, url, dates and times, a description, and some tags, and then encoding that data into an hCalendar event on the page. Once the data has been encoded into the hCalendar microformat, any software that supports hCalendar can extract the event details and add it to a calendar, run a search for similar events, or anything else.

To download the plugin for your own website or blog, please visit the hCalendar plugin page on my main site.

I would love to hear your feedback about this plugin in the comments. I hope to create some more plugins, including plugins to handle hCard data and Geo data once I have some more time.

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?

As great as the internet is, there’s nothing quite like meeting other people who share your passion face to face. That’s why I’m extremely excited about the opportunity to attend the WebVisions Conference in Portland Oregon later this week (Thursday and Friday).

Even though I’ve learned a lot about the internet and how it works on my own from reading, research, etc. nothing is quite the same as having the chance to talk to people who know the business better than you do. The chance to ask questions, participate in live discussions, and hear the passion in someone’s voice is priceless.

That’s a good thing to keep in mind as we build websites too. Even though a site IS an online entity, not an in person meeting, people will be more willing to trust you if you can provide an “in person” feel to your site. Isn’t that why sites like Facebook and Myspace do so well?

Of course, not everybody can start their own social network — nor should they. However, if you stop talking AT your audience, and start sharing something your passionate about with them, it shows. Enthusiasm is infections, and if you can communicate to your audience that you care about them personally, and that you truly believe what you have to offer is the best thing for them, they’ll listen.

After all, why else would I fly across North America to learn stuff I could probably get from the net if I looked hard enough? It’s not about the information, it’s about how it’s presented.

PS: Keep an eye out for posts live from Portland and the WebVisions conference over the next few days. And if anyone who’s attending happens to read this, shoot me a comment, I’d love to meet up with you there!

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?