Get a Site in 48 Hours
By David Golding
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We just rolled out a new service: get a site in 48 hours. All too often, I run into folks who went shopping for websites, as it were, and were amazed at the enormous investment it usually requires. With so many billions of sites out there on the web, why does it cost me the thousands to have one for myself? Another element is time. Small businesses can sometimes get locked into a corner where they’re almost forced to push something out on the web in so little time that the price gets inflated on them whenever they talk to a designer or developer (or worse, an agency of some sort).
And so many small business owners go out there are buy up a template. It’s cheap, and it looks good, right? Well, yes, they are cheap, but usually pretty ugly or you run into an even bigger hassle. You don’t know HTML, the template doesn’t look right in the program you bought like FrontPage or GoLive or Dreamweaver, and you’re stuck. So you go right back to all those designer blood hounds you swore you wouldn’t pay a couple grand to do something you thought you could do on your own.
Sound familiar? Maybe.
We aim to solve these problems by offering site implementation services in 48 hours. You pick a template, you upload some content, and we’ll do all that nitty-gritty nasty work for you. The sites are beautiful, professionally designed in the first place, and in the second place, it’s like buying anything else on the net: you just click, submit, and you’re done.
We’re really excited about this new set up and can’t wait to get started on your site. Run on over to our Get a Site in 48 Hours page for more details on how, in just 4 steps and in 2 days, your site will be stamped, sealed, and delivered.
Content Management Systems Compared
By David Golding
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A hugely important task to maintaining a quality web site that gets good levels of traffic and high rankings in search engines is a steady stream of useful content. Perhaps the best example of this is Wikipedia. Because it is user-generated, millions of articles are updated daily. Their entire collection is one of the most useful sources for information available and is also one of the most scalable databases on top of that. The system itself, though, would be impossible without some powerful content management applications.
If you’ve never been exposed to a content management system of any kind, well, you’re looking at one. This entire web site is customized using several tools and raw scripts that make it possible for me to maintain the content of this site. To generate all the HTML for each update would be too tedious and time-consuming.
But what content management system to use? Deciding on one can be a costly investment in either time or money, or both. I will offer my recommendations, but the only way to truly know what works best is to demo each one separately.
Drupal
I’m a fan of Drupal because of its structure. You can design nodes, individual elements that serve custom purposes. It also behaves well with templates and permissions so that you can have others with less access privileges edit specified areas of content. The security is as good as anything else I’ve seen, and it’s open source which makes it free and up-to-date.
WordPress
For blogging, the best I’ve used is WordPress. It’s actually very easy to install if you’ve ever installed a PHP program before. And it’s got a beautiful administrator’s panel that makes blogging easy. It’s possible, and I’ve seen it done, to use WordPress as a content management system on top of blogging. In this regard, I think it’s quite powerful, but you may need to know some HTML to get it to work professionally.
CMS Matrix
CMS Matrix lists dozens of content management systems and lets you compare all the features. After giving one CMS a try, you can refer to this site to make solid comparisons.
BCS = Customer Abuse
By David Golding
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If you haven’t heard, the Bowl Championship Series for College Football has once again disappointed the masses with a controversial championship game match up. The scenario is somewhat complicated, but all in all, most people agree that we don’t know for sure if the Ohio State Buckeyes versus the Florida Gators is an accurate battle of the number 1 and number 2 teams in the country. The BCS system is a total blunder in this respect.
What is the clarion call of fans, players, coaches, and even some university presidents? Playoff. The only ones in any sizeable group that want to keep the BCS system as it is are university presidents directly involved in the BCS, bowl committees, and conference commissioners (some). The BCS favors schools from big-name conferences and occasionally even messes them up.
Who matter most in the market for college football? Those that finance the whole operation. And those that provide all the financing are the fans. They are the ones that buy the tickets, purchase the TV packages, consume the advertising, and pay for the memorabilia. They are also the ones who are most irate. In this climate, it is clear that BCS is a textbook example of customer abuse: not only avoid delivering what the customer wants, but purposefully deliver what he or she does not want in an effort to make money.
Controversies like these expose the BCS for what it is, a system that help the rich get richer and deprive the fans what they want. In the end, it only hurts them worse. Companies that engage in customer abuse almost always fare worse than if they would strive to meet customer desires. I may be wrong, but keep your eyes peeled in the future for a shake up of the BCS. In the end, it always happens to companies that abuse the customer, even if it takes a couple decades, but it does happen.
And if you’re wondering if you employ abusive tactics in your marketing and business, take a look at the BCS and see how you compare.
