Steve’s Blog

Is there anything more off-putting than a visiting website to buy something and seeing © 1998 at the bottom? Well, yes‚Ķ.trying to keep your site up-to-date and relevant can seem equally disheartening. A few years ago, if you‚Äôre company had some exciting news you‚Äôd call up your web-designer, hand over $200, wait in-line while they dealt with their other clients, finally get your small changes made, see they‚Äôd made a mistake, call them up, wait in line… Well, people have been working on software to simplify that whole frustrating process and put the power to update your websites into YOUR…

This came about after talking to a client who runs a big company that advertises widely. He asked me why the vast majority of his leads came via his website or the phone when he took such good care to place his e-mail address at top of each advertisement. Why did no-one seem to use or remember it? Our subsequent conversation produced advice that I hope will be useful for everyone else out there who uses their e-mail as a business tool: Don’t Use a Free E-mail Address That includes Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, BellSouth, Alltell and others. There are given…

E-commerce has been around for more than 15 years now and people are increasingly comfortable opening their wallets online. However, I still come across a lot of websites that are a real turn-off to customers. Hopefully yours isn‚Äôt one of them, but just in case, here are my top four hints for making your website sleek, speedy and secure: 1) You need an SSL. That stands for ‚ÄúSecure Socket Layer‚Äù. What does it mean? It means that a special form of encryption is used to protect the details of everyone who sends you information via your website. If you go…

In March, I talked about the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org), which is one of the most important places on the web to get your site listed. It is also one of the most difficult. In fact, a few people wrote to me after the article came out and agreed that it had been almost impossible for them to get listed in the Open Directory. Several of these people were realtors and when I was doing some research to help them out, I ran across this statement from someone who judges sites for the OD: ‚Äúthere is one type of site that…