Have You Heard?

After years of speculation, it’s official: Google’s Matt Cutts stated that Google’s indexing formula ignores the ‘keywords’ meta tag.  What does this mean?  The meta keywords tag does nothing for your position on Google.  However, they are still used by many other search engines and directories, so don’t be too hasty and delete them from your web pages.  As I have mentioned before, having some extra meta tags in your site code is not going to harm you, so it is not a “bad” idea to keep up with your meta keywords.

Twitter is one of the hottest trends on the internet right now. For those of you not in the know, it’s what is called a microblogging service. It’s basically a page that stores any number of text updates, limited to 160 characters maximum. It’s almost like uploading SMS messages for everyone to see, allowing you to follow what your friends and acquaintances are up to 24/7.

You may have even seen little Twitter “badges” on people’s websites. These are little modular paces of code that will display your latest tweet right on your own webpage. It’s a pretty neat widget to have if you have a personal page, or own a business and want to keep your customers updated on your latest specials, but don’t want them to navigate away from your web page.

Putting a Twitter badge on your website is actually really easy, because all the hard stuff is done for you already. After you’ve setup your twitter account , visit this website: TwitStamp.com

Once you’ve customized and fiddled with your shiny new Twitter badge and you deem it satisfactory, simply scroll to the bottom where it says “Use it”. Click the first field that says “HTML”, copy the code, and paste the code, exactly as it is, into your website’s HTML page.

The next time you reload your page, you’ll have a widget displayed, just like it is now, after I inserted the HTML into this blog post.

As you can see, there are a variety of ways in which you can customize your badge, so have fun with it, keep it relevant, and Tweet on!

Fads of the decades:

1960’s: tie-dye, lava lamps, and ouija boards
1970’s: tetherball, pet rocks, and Farrah Faucet hair
1980’s: parachute pants, Rubik’s cube, and Jazzercise
1990’s: Tamagotchi, chat rooms, and spandex
2000’s: Crocs, Hannah Montana, and… social media??

Consider the following (adapted from Erik Qualman’s article, Social Media: Fad or Revolution?):

• By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers — 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
• One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
• Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences!
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
• Wikipedia has more than 13 million articles. Some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.
• There are more than 200,000,000 blogs.  Fifty-four percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• Years to reach 50 million users: Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years. Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months; iPhone applications hit 1 billion in nine months.

So… you decide.  Is social media just another fad, or has it completely revolutionized the way people across the globe do business, connect with loved ones, share information, and live their everyday lives?

Need help revving up your company’s presence in the social media world?  WEBii can help!  Contact one of our specialists today to talk about starting a customized social media plan for your business.

As more of your competitors venture onto the Web, you may be searching for ways to stand out from the crowd.  One way that companies are connecting with their audiences is through a “mascot”.

Your mascot may be a completely fictional character illustration that represents your product or service.  Many well known organizations from Jack-in-the-Box to sports teams, have used fictional characters to deliver their message to the customer.

Alternatively, you might use an actual company representative like your CEO to offer personal welcome messages, video intros, and other campaign messages.

Finally, there are a growing number of professional services offering interactive video features in which a hired model “walks” onto your web site to welcome you or to point you to a specific product.  This may be an affordable way to increase awareness about your site and interact with your customers without redesigning your entire business brand.

Are you asking yourself “Is my website down?”

There are many, many different things that can cause a connection error between between you and your website. Just because you can’t load your website, it doesn’t mean that your web hosting server is actually down.

If your web browser is displaying a connection error, try these things before calling your web hosting company:

1) Try connecting to a different website, and refreshing the page.

If you can load the other website correctly, skip to step 2. If not, you have a general internet connection issue, and should contact your internet service provider.

2) Check your domain name registration: www.whois.net

If your WHOIS record shows that your domain name registration is expired, you simply need to renew your registration with your Domain Name registrar, and your website will be back up shortly. If your domain name registration is NOT expired, skip to step 3.

3) Try connecting using your website’s IP address.

If it works, something is wrong with the DNS for your website. You will need to contact your Web Host and let them know that your Domain Name is not resolving correctly.

If you still cannot connect to your website, even using the IP address, you might be blocked by your hosting company’s firewall, and you will need to contact them.

The best way to tell if your website is actually down, or if your issue is specific to your network, computer, or web browser, is to have someone that is connected to the internet from a different network attempt to visit your website. If no one is available, you can visit your website via a proxy server. Connecting to your website via a proxy website will simulate connecting from a network outside your own.

Here is a link to a popular free proxy site:
www.megaproxy.com

If someone from a different network can connect to your website, then your website is functional, but there is a connection issue caused by either your network, computer, or browser. Your hosting company’s firewall might be preventing your computer from accessing their servers as well, so you should give them a quick call and let them know what is going on.

You don’t need to be intimidated by the internet. It’s merely a collection of interconnected websites, and websites are actually very simple things. They are files that people can access through Internet Browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. See? It’s not so scary when you break it down to its simplest elements.

You will need to do 3 things to make a website and publish it online: Create your Website Files, Purchase Web Hosting Space and Register a Domain Name, and Upload Your Files to a Web Server.

1) Create Your Website Files:

The website files are what visitors see when they visit your website. Basic websites are constructed with HTML code, but if you don’t know how to code HTML, there are programs that build websites in an environment similar to word processors (I.E Microsoft Word) and can generate your HTML files for you. Adobe Dreamweaver is a popular program, but if you’re looking for a free solution, Mozilla has a free HTML editor named SeaMonkey. (You can use any program you want, these are just recommendations).
Download and install the SeaMonkey program on your computer, then open the program.

In the SeaMonkey program, go to File > New > Composer Page.

Starting a New Web Page in SeaMonkey

This is where you can build your web page. Once you’re finished with a page, make sure to Save it. It will automatically save as an HTML document, with the file extension “.html”.

Great! You’ve now created your website files, and they’re saved on your computer. Now you need to find a company to host your files on the internet.

2) Purchase Web Hosting Space and Register a Domain Name:

A Domain Name is the name that will point to your website, such as “example.com” or “example.net”. Web hosting companies have servers that specialize in storing websites for people to access over the internet. Purchase some web hosting space from a company that offers the domain name as well, because it will greatly simplify the process. Some hosts even offer free domain name registration with the purchase of web hosting space. Example: Webii.net

Once you’ve purchased hosting space and a domain name, make sure to ask the company for your “FTP connection information” so that you can move onto step 3.

3) Upload Your Files to your Web Server:

In order to upload the website files that you created in step 1 to the web hosting server space that you purchased in step 2, we’re going to use something called an FTP program. There is a great, free program called Filezilla (made by the brains behind the Firefox web browser), and you can download it here: Download Filezilla

Download the the appropriate file depending on your operating system, install Filezilla on your computer, and open up the program.

In order to connect to your web server, you’ll need the following information, available from your web host: FTP Hostname, User Name, and Password. You can enter this information into the fields at the top of the Filezilla program and click “quick connect”. You should now be connected to your web server.

Connecting to your Web Server

Once you’ve connected, you can use the left window pane to navigate your computer’s files, and you can upload files from your computer to the web server. Ask your web host which directory contains your website files. You will upload the HTML files that you created on your computer onto the web server, into that specific directory.

Now, try visiting your domain name in a web browser. You’re on the web! You see? Publishing a web site onto the internet is easy. Making a web site that looks good? Now that is a different story.