Recently a client called and suggested we’re all doing bad because of gas prices. In the web business it is just the opposite. Most smart business owners know now is the time to be found through their website. With gas prices toping $4.00 and no end in sight more people turn to the web before getting in their cars.
If you don’t have a well optimized website now is the time to get one or update your old one so it can be found. PAontheweb.com specializes in getting you found on Google, MSN, Yahoo and others for “what you do and where you are located.” Did you ever wonder why you don’t show up on Google for anything other than the name of your company? We know the secret and we’re here to help.
We are so confident of our search engine optimization for small and medium sized local businesses we often don’t charge until you have achieved your position on Google. We don’t know anyone else in the business that does that.
I can’t believe it has been two years since we really found much to say about politics. Of course, we don’t want to offend any party since I’m sure our site visitors are from both Democrat, Independent and Republican parties. That’s why we’ve taken the approach that we should work on positive solutions that appeal to all Americans.
We all want border safety, a good economy, lower energy prices, realistic immigration policies, an end to war, terrorism, racism, child abuse etc. and the list goes on and on. The few that don’t want these things are outside the norm. The main difference in the parties is how we get there but we all want to get there.
We believe American Solutions is the greatest thing to hit the internet in our political memory. A cross section of people from all parties working towards common goals is the only way to help put an end to Washington Gridlock. Neither McCain, Obama or any of the third party candidates are capable of doing this. All great movements have been “grass roots” movements. The people must rise up and protest to their elected representatives or vote them out of office the next time they can. Presidents do not make laws, the Legislature does. Yes, the Supreme Court has been over stepping its boundaries in this arena. A new law that would limit the terms of Supreme Court judges is in order!
The Legislature seldom listens to their constituents. The only way to get things done is to first voice your opinions loudly and then vote them out when they don’t listen.
The other thing most of us agree on is raising taxes is not the way to go. If you won a million dollars and you were going to give 100,000 dollars to charity would you give it to the US government? Why not? Most of us instinctively know the government will waste the money, that is what they do best. There is a complete lack of responsibility when it comes to spending our money by the Legislature. If our government spent the tax revenue as wisely as the average American home, there would be a surplus in tax monies collected. There is no need to raise taxes. There is a need to spend it with more wisdom. All American’s could be covered by health care, our military could go forward as the premier fighting force and the other issues like National debt would dissolve away.
To bottom line it we don’t think any candidate is going to make a difference. Some want to raise taxes and speak eloquently. Others don’t have great presence but will be a bit better about spending limits. Neither one really has the power to make sweeping changes that only Congress can achieve. No wonder Congress has a lower approval rating than the current President!
So, what is the answer? The answer is us (US). We must start pressuring politicians to make a difference or lose their job regardless of party affiliation. If you took 60 seconds to read this please take 60 seconds to sign the petition and ask your friends to do the same.
We know there are 3 things we must do to lower oil and gas prices.
1. Put the clamps back on the speculators.
2. Drill here, drill now and remove politicians from Congress that get in the way. Sorry Democrats, nothing personal, most of you are in the way. 70% of Americans stand against you on this.
3. Find alternative energy sources and start building nuclear power plants again. Again, sorry Democrats, you’re in the way on this as well. I’m not playing partisian politics here. It is just a fact that you are the majority in Congress and the mamority of those opposing common sense for ideology.
We noticed a lot of yard sales going on in our area. We thought to add Yard Sales to our events calendar. Why? The events calendar provides a automatic time frame to advertise your yard sale and great Google Maps link so people can find you easier. If you’re having a Yard Sale, Garaga Sale or just about anything add it to our PA events calendar. Click Here to add yours now
PAontheweb.com has opened directories in other states as well as directories that focus on certain industries. If you’re looking for free listings in these states or industry visit the sites below.
http://www.realty-rentals.com/ is for selling, renting and buying homes, condos, property and apartments. There is a very small listing fee with this system. If you’re a web customer this service is free.
Our newest industry specific directory for golf is http://www.golfersltd.com/ which lists over 11 thousand golf courses U.S. wide
All these sites are free for the listing except Realty-Rentals. This one costs just a little bit for a 6 month listing period. If you sell the property just replace it with another.
We’ve been using Pay Pal and a regular point of sale module for several years. I find PayPal.com to be more beneficial in several ways. First, they only pull one consistent fee. At the writing of this it is 3.9% and 30 cents per transaction. Google check out is better at 2 percent and 20 cents per transaction but does not allow for recurring payments. Google continues to say it is coming but it never seems to get here. Like most businesses I am left with high priced point of sales modules that charge different fees for different cards plus other strange (hidden) fees that pop up from nowhere. Or, a single point consistent option called PayPal.com.
Other strengths of PayPal are its ability to track well for tax season making it easier on my accountant, allowing for either the seller or the buyer to cancel the transaction without going through hoops and a very easy to use interface and finally they even pay you a little interest through a money market. It accepts all majore credit cards too! My best bet and recommendation to all is go for PayPal.com.
Notice we don’t have a link to PayPal here and we’re not making one dime in referrals. This is a simple unsolicited recommendation to all.
Do you get a lot of hackers trying to access your website? Did you know that 90% or more of all hacking is done from outside the United States? Now you can pick what countries to block from accessing your website. It’s easy if you’re a webmaster. If not, contact us and we can help for a small fee. All you need is your FTP login information and tell us what countries you’d like to block. If you are a do it yourselfer or webmaster click this link http://blockacountry.com
Link backs to PAontheweb.com often reveal that folks are not getting their pages properly indexed with Google. If your page does not appear in Google’s index then the link back does not do us or you any good.
How do you know if your pages are indexed? Go to your website and click the various pages and paste the web address into the http://www.Google.com search bar. If no results come up then the page is not indexed and you’re not benefiting.
Do you need help? PAontheweb.com prides itself on getting our clients 100% indexed with Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Google sends around 80% of all search engine traffic. If you win with Google you’ll win with with the majority.
Did you ever wonder where you come up on Google and other search engines for ranking? Here is a handy tool.
Search Engine Rankings - Instant, online reports of web site rankings in 9 top search engines and web directories, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, AOL, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Yahoo! Directory, Open Directory (Dmoz), and LookSmart.
Link Popularity Checker - Instant, online reports of a site’s link popularity rating in 3 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and MSN - FREE!
Did you ever run across a website that uses text inside of an image? Why doesn’t it get found by the search engines? Imagine the robots that scan the web as a blind man that cannot see images. Now, imagine text as brail. The text is what the robots can read, not the pretty pictures.
If you’re going to create an image rich website make sure to match it with text or you’ll be lucky to get 100 visitors per month!
A common practice is creating flash intro pages or image intro pages to websites. PAontheweb.com gave up that practice a long while back. Why? It can prevent search engines from indexing your site properly. I know 90% of all good webmasters know this already. However, we see many who still practice it. You should consider reading this article by Google. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=72746&query=flash+intro+pages&topic=&type=
We have found sIFR to cause websites to load slowly and do not yet use this method. Opinions may vary. We certainly use Flash Elements and Headers to bring out certain points for clients. We do not normally do all Flash sites (although we can if you insist).
1. Open Outlook Express
2. Click Tools then Accounts from the top drop down menu
3. Click Add (top right) then select Mail
4. Set Display Name (the name you want people to see when they get email from you) then click Next Note: The Display Name is called Your Name in regular Outlook. This name should include the name of your website or company. Example, Mike Kelly PAontheweb is how mine appears.
5. Enter full email address then click Next
6. POP 3 is the default, let it there and then put incoming and outgoing mail as mail.yourdomain.com, example mail.paontheweb.com would be ours and click Next
7. Account Name is your full email address, not just the first part.
8. Password is your password and select Remember Password check box then click Next and Finish
We wondered that too. We have our own dedicated servers and wondered how hosting companies can give away so much bandwidth and storage space. We would be in the hole if we tried to do that.
I finally discovered an answer from someone I know who owns a large hosting company, Hostgator. In the blog area (not easily found by most casual visitors) Brent spells it out. First, they allow approximately 2,000 websites per server. At $400 per month to lease for a good dedicated server that allows a lot of websites! Next, most people use only a small portion of what they are granted, less than 200 megs for a very large non porn website. If you’re not hosting movies or bit torrent sites you rarely get above 200, PAontheweb.com is not even 200 megs!
The one thing they don’t tell you is they cut you off if you use too much in the way of system resources like CPU usage. If your site is pulling tons of resources you’ll be notified and then shut down if you don’t comply. You will also note that many of these companies (not all) add very large hard drives to their servers. This reduces the over all effectiveness of the CPU and other things like RAM. That is why there are so many complaints about cheap website hosts.
Let’s face it. You’ve got to run a streamlined server to keep your clients happy. In order to do that you (as a server admin) must stay on top of system resources being consumed. That’s one of the main differences between dedicated business hosting and inexpensive hosting like GoDaddy, Networksolutions etc. There are other differences like support and redundancy. For example, our servers are backed up automatically on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and there is never a fee to restore a website to one of those three options.
Besides all that our servers are RAID 10 SATA II minimum meaning they have many redundancies built in. This may be outdated information by the time you’re reading it. We’re continually upgrading servers to the next phase as soon as it becomes needed. For example, we’re already considering moving up to a Quad-Core 3210 Xeon (Kentfield). Keeping our clients on the best systems available is one of our greatest services.
One of the most common questions we get is “what can I expect from my website?” meaning what kind of action will I get off my website. There are too many variables to give an honest answer. Here are some general things we’ve learned over the years.
Who created your website?
If you did it yourself or had a cousin or friend who is an I.T. professional do it the odds are very low that you’ll get much in the way of results. Why do we add the “I.T. (information technology) professional to our list of poor website designers? It is like asking a dentist to perform brain surgery. While the two may at first seem related it soon becomes apparent that they are worlds apart.
How often do things change on your website?
Like anything that stays the same, it tends to gather dust. A static website is commonly referred to as a “cobweb’ by our team. Do you go back to websites that never change or do you continually visit websites that have new information? If you have a website you should have one you can update on your own and update it frequently. If you have lots of money, hire a pro to change it for you.
What is your personal home page set at?
If you have your own website why would you have your home page set to Yahoo or Google? If you want your website to grow have your website set as your home page. What is your home page? This is the page your browser opens to automatically when you start it up.
How popular is the subject of your website?
If your website is about mundane things then there is little chance you’ll find much success. Are people looking for what you provide? If not, then your website will probably not perform well on its own (organically). You may want to look at a marketing strategy for your website to target the few that are interested.
How much content does your website have?
Content is King. First you need a lot of content so Google and humans can find what they’re looking for. The more information you have the better your chances are of being found by both the major search engines and the human beings looking for the information your website contains.
Is your business or location seasonal?
Ice cream in Alaska during the winter is not nearly as popular as it would be in Florida during the summer. If you’re focused in the northern hemisphere (like PAontheweb.com) you may find more traffic to your website during the winter than the summer. People are indoors more and on the computer in the winter because of the temperature and the shorter days. This may also be true during the dog days of summer when it is so hot outside people would rather be in the cool.
This is by no means a complete list of the variables that make a website great. However, it is a good starting point.
Recently, a potential client said to one of my sales reps, “that looks like a template.” What he probably meant is the site looked like a prefabricated website where they all look the same. Let’s clear something up. ALL websites start out with a template. There are several kinds of templates when it comes to website design. The definition of a Templae taken from Dictionary.com is below:
Computer Science A document or file having a preset format, used as a starting point for a particular application so that the format does not have to be recreated each time it is used
1. First and foremost, templates are usually created for Webmasters or “do it yourself” types. You can buy a template but then you need a program like Dreamweaver, Front Page, Adobe Go Live or others and some skill to FTP it to your hosting platform and make it all work. PAontheweb.com creates custom templates. We match your business colors, insert your logo and do other custom design work for your website template, business cards etc. All websites start with a template, either custom made or prefabricated.
2. Next is your search engine optimization. It is one thing to have a good looking website it is quite another to get it ranked with Google and other search engines. This is where 99% of all websites fail. Few Webmasters (so called) actually know what they are doing when it comes to getting your website found for the terms you want. That is one of our specialties.
3. There are prefabricated templates that you can get from places like Template Monster. These templates have two distinct prices.
a. A low price as anyone may have this template. That means 100 or more people may be using the same template as you.
b. A much higher exclusive price which means you pay 2 or 3 thousand and you are the only one that can have that design.
4. All websites start out with a Template. When we create a website for your company it is called a Custom Template. This Template is applied to most if not all pages of your website.
5. Our system allows you to purchase and display different templates at different times of the year. For example, you may purchase a website from us but want to decorate for the holidays like Christmas, Independence Day and many other holidays. In less than 2 seconds you can change the entire look of your website without disturbing the pages and the content already on your website!
We hope this helps you understand a bit more about templates.
