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January Table of Contents

• Hits & Misses of 2005
• Designing for Firefox
• Success at OPM
• Cool Sites
  

Hit & Misses of 2005

Misses

VOiP – Vonage lost a big lead by spending for advertising instead of service improvement and endorsing as a company to a very unethical set of core values. See http://www.netadventures.biz/vonageproblem.htm.

The Government – Both Executive and Administrative branches rolled over and died. They, like Vonage, were driven by unethical values and money. Congress votes 223 million to build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. (Read the full article. Congress didn’t vote to build the bridge, but rather voted to give them the money to do it. (The Washington Post title is misleading. That doesn’t save anyone’s political neck.) At the same time, Congress can’t build extra lanes for congested Interstates in Oregon. Both of my senators and my representative voted for the bridge to nowhere. Maybe they should move to Alaska. And Bush has a long, long, long list of misses. The Republican party has died.

The Search Engines – CNN advertising, which is driven from Yahoo, leads their advertising with ads for a company that has poor ethics. So they make lots of money for the advertisement; but who wants to advertise with Yahoo when you can’t trust their advertisements? We are pulling our own ads with them.

e-Commerce – Currently protects the seller but not the consumer. Ditto the search engines.

Spam - Our spam load continues to increase, even with filters on the host and our own system. The latest is some joker with a site selling watches with a whole collection of different domain names making it difficult to block him. The FTC, of course isn’t doing anything with the blokes. In Germany they find them $65,000 a spam. Who will you vote for next fall?

My Motorola cell phone went dead three times this year. I’m on my third phone. The last time it failed all I had to do was reboot (does Microsoft own Motorola?), but the cell phone didn’t tell me that. After it didn’t ring for a few days, a support store showed me how to reboot and find the 12 lost messages that had been left.

Broadband is overpriced and run by monoplies. New Orleans is leading the way with free WiFi, but other cities are afraid of the broadband companies and not offering any free WiFI – including my own city of Portland, Oregon.

HDTV - Most of the HDTVs sold now are not really high resolution. The display is tricked down to the lower resolution, more like a DVD quality. It still looks great, but you aren’t getting all the pixels.

Hits

VOiP – If you avoid Vonage, you can save about 30% on your telephone by going to VOiP. There are almost no surcharges and long distance is often free.

With the Government non-functioning, thanks to someone that imported Venezuela gas and was selling it in New Orleans at about 33% of the current retail price. What does this tell you about the oil companies and President Bush? And thanks to many, many people, organizations, and corporations that did take responsibility in helping the people on the Gulf Coast during the Katrina disaster.

Search Engines - In the search engine war between Google, Yahoo, and MSN – the consumer will win. Most people trust the organic (free) listings. Why pay for advertising and compete with unethical companies?

e-Commerce passed the 30 billion mark in sales over the Christmas holidays. That’s a 30% increase from last year.

Stopping SPAM - We load the spamming domains and IPs to an online and uncopyrighted database on one of our web sites at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. We invite hackers to launch viruses, trojans, and DoS at the IPs and domains, destroying them. This has gotten to be a very popular page (PageRank=4) and gets lots of hits. One guy threated to sue, but we sent copies of his email (which violated the CAN-SPAM) to his state attorney general. We haven’t heard from him any more.

My blogs have doubled the traffic on my web sites this last month. There are over 19 million blogs out there now.

HDTV - Some of the newer HDTV sets and a few of the leading HDTV manufacturers (Toshiba is one) use a new and special chip in their televisions that gets the promised HDTV resolution. Be wise if you are purchasing HDTV. Find out who is using the chip and then make your purchase as a wise buyer.

Designing for Firefox

Over 100 million users have now downloaded the Firefox browser. About 16% of the sessions on our web site are using the FireFox browser. That means if you are trying to reach a cutting edge demographic, your site better work in the Firefox browser. Unfortunately, many sites break when using Firefox. That can translate to lost customers. It is more than an issue of your site might look bad in Firefox. It may not work at all.

The breaking primarily occurs with interactive aspects of the site: JavaScript menus, shopping carts, polling scripts, registration forms - that kind of thing.

The secret of capturing that 16% (or whatever) of those entering your site using Firefox is to be sure your site works with the web standards as defined by the folks at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C.

Here are our suggestions for doing this:

1. First, check your statistics on your site to see what percentage of users coming into your site are using Firefox, or Mozilla. (Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox).
   
   
2. Be sure you have a DOCTYPE tag on each of your web pages that defines the standard you are using. You can see an example by looking at the source code for our home page (or this page) and looking at the DOCTYPE tag for the first line in the code. Start your code the same way.
   
   
3. You can get a free program to check a web page for its compliant with standards at:
   http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/. Use it to verify your coding. Also, Some editors, such as Dreamweaver, do some level of validating your code.
   
   
4. Download the Firefox browser (which is free) and check your web pages using it. You can download it from:

http://www.mozilla.org/

The advantages of using a Firefox/standard site:

• You will capture those users who fomerly found your site broken.
  
  
• You will get better search engine optimization. Some engines don’t index sites with broken code too well. They want sites designed for the standards, and you use the DOCTYPE metatag to define what standard they should check your site against.

These two are definite. MarketSherpa also reports you will gain decreased development and maintenance costs, lower bandwidth costs, faster download times, and mobile device viewing

If you are looking at our site, there are over 800 pages in it. Checking all of these and editing as necessary is a time consuming task. We will try to work top-down, but don’t expect us to check even the top levels quickly. We do want, however, to keep our users happy.

Success at OPM

Here are several notes on our search engine optimization work and insights this past month:

1. We successfully got a client to a #2 position in Yahoo out of 53,000 indexed pages on a popular keyword phrase. Her Google position is coming up but is slower as the links build. Our search engine optimization book tells how we did this.
2. Adding Darcy to our business site doubled the traffic through the site. Darcy thanks you.
3. On our ministry site, adding a good blog increased traffic by over 50%.
   
4. If you have tried to sign up for Googles new Google Analytics to track your web statistics, you’ve probably discovered that they are overloaded with signups. We use a commercial program of the Urchin Google purchased, but may switch to Google Analytics if they can every get it going. It is very important that you have some type of system to monitor your site and give you feedback on how your site is working. We include some level of monitoring at no extra charge on all sites we host.

Cool Sites

Here are Evan William’s ten rules for web startups:

http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

What are the top ten mistakes people make in designing web sites? You know, they really haven’t changed that much the last few years. Check out the list from Jakob Neilsen: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html, a leading web site designer today.