Web Consulting Washington DC

Picture having a running grocery list at work. As you happen to think about things you need to pick up at the store, you quickly scribble things down on a piece of paper. On the way home from work, you realize you have an hour to kill and you decide to stop by the supermarket to knock it out. As you walk into the store, you realize, darn you forgot your list.

Has that happen to you?

I signed up with Gubb to manage my grocery list and now there’s no more missing gorcery list problems. There’s no more list problems, period.

Yeah, but I have room for one more overly feature rich, complex program to help manage my life and business like I have room for another set of in-laws, why should I use this thing?

I found this little “web 2″ gem to be just about perfect. You can definitely squeeze this one in. Gubb.net lets you make, lists, that’s it. Simple. And you can access them through your web enabled cell phone. The sign up, setup, all of it, was a breeze and I got right into using it in about 10 seconds. They strictly follow the “don’t make me think” rules of engagement. It’s just absolutely useful.

Great, now the in-laws want us to vacation with them. They’re talking about camping and they want my wife and I to bring… everything. I don’t want to get swamped with email requests for BBQ chips, how do I get this organized between us all without losing it?

First take a deep breath. No worries, mate. Just share your list with your in-laws, or whoever you want to help your get organized. You just add their email address and your off to the races, or camping, or whatever you do with your in-laws. Its one of the best list sharing tools I have come across.

Wow. Well, the in-laws just called and they said they liked this thing so much that they were wondering if they can post the list to their blog. Yes, they’re bloggers, and apparently somewhat famous, probably writing about how much they enjoy bugging me.

Common, this is web 2.0 stuff. There’s always an RSS feed. Simply click under options and find the Feed that’s associated with with the list, copy, paste into your favorite news reader or blog tool, and that’s it! You can attach your list anywhere frankly, with anything that understands RSS technology. For your privacy, your feed reader should support “authenticated feeds”, which simply means you need to enter a username and password to access the feed the first time. You can turn this authentication off if need be.

What else can this baby do?

Check out iCal. If you have Outlook 2007, this feed type integrates with your Outlook Calendar really well. So for example, you can track a list of appointments on Gubb that will appear as a calendar in your Outlook and you’ll be able to identify any conflicts that you may come across your other calendars (use Outlooks Overlay feature). Very easy to use together.

I love it and I love you.

I know bro. I know.

We are fast approaching the end of the year and for some of you, you only have a few days before you leave for the holidays. Before you rush off to gift giving and eggnogs, here are 5 things to do right now to make sure your web site is in good shape for 2008.

1) At the top of the list, check that darn copyright date! Nothing is more glaring than reading about all the rights you’ve reserved, last year. Make sure that the date either automatically updates itself (dynamically generated) or that someone in your organization adds 2008 to the date range the minute they get back into the office January 1st (yeah right). Yes, it may be a mere formality in most cases, but search engines do look for incongruent elements like these and factor them into their algorithms to determine your page rank and ultimately your search engine results placement. If they see your site is still claiming rights for 2007, they may penalize you over your competitor who’s got a brand new 2008 copyright declared.

2) While your you’re at it, check that privacy statement and terms of service. A year has passed and can you remember the last time you looked at the privacy statement? Probably not. Is it still congruent with your company policies? Does it reference services or products you no longer support or provide service for? Privacy statements and TOS’ seem to fall into the “create and forget” types of pages. However, considering that in the even of a dispute or issue, they may save you or your customers some heartache, you should really be periodically reviewing them. Every 6 months for information web sites (corporate web site), quarterly for ecommerce sites, and monthly for any innovative, user content generated web sites. Yes, that means reviewing them with your attorney if your fortunate enough to afford one.

3) Do you need update pricing? Now is as good as any to decide if you need to update your pricing or inventory. Look and see if there will be any increase in shipping costs in particular. 2008 is already shaping out to be a sketchy year so you might as well get ready now.

4) Look for any outdated or soon-to-be-dated content. Do you need to move anything into those “archives” like you did the year before? Do you need to setup any new 2008 areas of your web site? It is better to avoid creating directories with the date as part of the URI. Yes, my blog does say 2007 in each of the top posts. And yes, in this particular case, do as I say, not as I do. Again, search engines will automatically start to defer down dated content, particularly last year’s content. Don’t be surprised to see drop in your web stats, it’s part of the search engine year end clean up that happens. That leads us to #5.

5) Create and stage any new content for early 2008! After a week or two off for the holidays, you will likely have to take a little time to get back into the routine of updating your web sites. So get started now! Create a few draft articles for your blog and try to get the bulk of it done before you leave. Sure, you may want to write the proverbial “look back to 2007″ article, but its far more important to talk about what’s coming ahead in early 2008 than what happened in 2007. As far as SEO goes, nostalgia is always out, “new and improved” is always, always going to be in.

Happy holidays everyone! Thanks for making 2007 fantastic.

Ernesto Gluecksmann

How many of you out there have registered more than a few domain names? Considering how hard it is to simply find an available “.com” domain name, I would venture to say there’s a lot of you that have more than one. It make sense, you want to sure they’re available to you when someday in the future when you’re ready to do something with them, they’ll be there. And, if you like some of my more entrepreneurial clients, a few domain names can sometimes be a lot of domain names.

As much as I deplore the illegal practice of domain squatting (aka cybersquatting), it is certainly legal to register domain name for a future use. If you’re lucky enough to even find a decent domain name that isn’t already held by someone else, you should consider registering today, because really may not be there for you tomorrow.

That being said, NameDrive is a great service to park your domain names with them and here’s why:

If you use Register.com or GoDaddy as your registrar, you duly pay your annual registration fee to keep the domain under your ownership and control. Then, like most of us, we get to work on creating a masterpiece of a website, which of course takes time.

Until the website is complete, what is actually running under your shiny new domain name? Advertisements. And guess who’s profiting from them? Surprise! Not you. Your beloved registrar, yes, the company you just seemingly paid for the privilege for them to advertise on your domain name.

Argh, ok, so why not you? I agree, why not you!? It’s your domain name right?

Ok, queue in NameDrive. They help you sort this mess out. You sign up with them, they run ads on you domain name… and generously split the ad proceeds with you. Far better deal if you ask me.

How?

You simply point your domain name’s DNS to their servers, and they handle the rest. You can pick from a variety of templates. You can select what types of ads are suitable to run under you domain name (you wouldn’t run football ads under a “KittensNPuppiesForMe.com” would you? No of course not.) Or you can just let NameDrive put up a generic template and forget about it.

They’ll manage the ads, rotate out lower performing ads out, rotating better performing ads in, and provide you with statistics of how many visitors and click-throughs your domain names have attracted on their very own.

There are several other companies that compete against NameDrive, but most of them are for professional domain name… hogs. They offer services to questionable practice of bulk domain name buying and dumping. It’s not quiet illegal but not exactly nice either. These competitors want the big fish, and they set a minimum number of domain names you should have in tote. Usually anyone with less than 100 domains they’re not interested.

But you can place your one domain name if you like with NameDrive, they’re happy to have you no matter what. There’s no minimum stay, no contract, no setup fees, nothing. You put your domains in, and keep them there until your ready to do something else with them.

How much can I make with them and how do I know what they’re earning?

From NameDrive’s reports, you’ll easily see what kind of traffic they get without any heavy lifting. But before you get too excited with delusions of easy money, its not exactly easy.

In fact most of your domain names will likely not earn a dime. But don’t throw in the towel, it just means these domain names need to be developed into a full fledge website before traffic starts to generate. It’s a rare gem, that you domain name alone, has enough typed-in and residual traffic to make cash.

Regardless of your luck, NameDrive can still help you. Apart from identifying if your domain name is a diamond or dud, they have additional services available to you that can still help you make some cash. For example, if you want to sell your domain name, you can put it on the chopping block with them. They’ll help you find a buyer and broker a sale for you.

Or more interesting, NameDrive’s latest service called BuildingBlocks helps domain name owners find interested professional web developers, to help you develop your website concepts as part of a revenue sharing approach.

Whatever you end up doing, if you have a few domain names just sitting there collecting ad revenue for your registrar, I would consider parking them with NameDrive and make sure that revenue goes into your pocket, not the registrar. Good luck!

LogoLounge.com

This is probably one of the best sites I know to keep up with the world of logo design. Bill Gardner of LogoLounge puts together an annual Logo Trends report is just fantastic.

Logo Design
Creating new websites or blogs from scratch can be an overwhelming process, particularly for new businesses or clients whereby this is their first foray into the online world as content providers. There are just so many possibilities and decisions to make.

Let The Pros Do It
Occasionally, a client asks me to get involved with a logo creation and selection process. You should always hire a professional or a agency to develop the creative materials. My professional web consulting background stems from years of web programming and development. While I can definitely tell you how the aesthetics of your website/logo are impacting your business, I am not going to be the guy to design your logo. And unless you are a graphic design, you need to hire a professional. Creating art and discerning the quality of art in a market, are entirely separate skills.

Function And Form, Always!
I have long since learned (as well as the entire web industry) that function and form must go hand in hand. Consider it an absolute.

The example, is this blog I have started. We have all the sophisticated functionality of a WordPress blog in place, what are we missing? We’re missing a compelling ‘look’. Something that signals to visitors that this is a substantive site with valuable information.

“But I like this template, what’s wrong with just using the WordPress basic template?”

A visitor coming to this site is less likely to come back. It has a “template” like feel to it. The message a template site delivers is that the author doesn’t care enough or isn’t capable to provided a unique site design that represents itself as ready to serious business. And the more experienced the visitor is with the web, more likely they have been exposed to default templates that come built in.

I do care, by the way.

The Making of WCDC
One of the goals of WCDC is to implement many of the techniques and concepts of developing websites by not just talking about it, but by developing this blog and reflecting on it. So trust that, a logo and design template are on my list of To-Do’s for WCDC.

It should not go unnoticed the order I recommend when creating a website from scratch is how I am writing these posts. Its my hopes that I can chronicle its growth and share with you the many things that go into developing a great website.

Step 1
Find an available and suitable domain name by stopping BustAName.com.

Step 2
Get creative and put together a logo. Stop by LoungeLogo.com for ideas concepts.

Step 3
Develop your site design (I’ll come back to this).

Of course this a grand over simplification, but it is the initial first steps.

We have been working recently with the folks at Project On Government Oversight (POGO) on their new and improved Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. This database site is a resource that tracks the top 50 federal contractors and their, errhm, bad habits.

Their goal was to provide a centralized database listing of instances of misconduct, and vital to that was making sure the system easily provided all their cited publicly available sources.

POGO was founded in 1981 and they are an independent nonprofit that investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more accountable federal government.

We provided consulting and development services for their new database site. They needed something they could easily update and keep track of large body of links and information on a daily basis.

The database itself is a customized CMS system, completely CSS driven with built RSS feeds to facilitate syndication and tracking. In other words, pretty nice tool. Future articles we will discuss some of the underlining technologies, why they should matter to your business or organization and how you can benefit from these relatively news technologies.

Here’s three sites I never leave home without checking first.

kayak.com
I start with this one. They are an aggregator of airline prices. They are not online travel agents like Orbitz, rather, they report pricing through a fantastic GUI, easy to use, and covers 250 some airlines.

Farecast.com
If you have flexiblity in your travel schedule, you may want to check this website out. It uses a modeling engine that estimates roughly when the lowest fare will likely happen in the near future. Started from a University of Washington research project, computer scientist Oren Etzioni has developed modeling engine that does pretty accurate job. Nice!

Yapta.com
Airfare prices fluctuate, and occasionally you can get a real deal if you’re there at the right moment. Once you’ve picked the an airflight and fare that you want, you can use this site to alert you to any price drops. If you already bought a ticket, go ahead an do it anyway. The real secret is that most airlines will give you a travel voucher for the difference if you tell them that you noticed that they dropped the price of your ticket.