Everybody has a website now, and gone are the days of glitter text, animated GIFs and MIDI files playing in the background. A quality website is no longer just a “homepage” but a multi-million dollar corporate marketing campaign available, at the click of a button, to a global audience.

Everyone wants that low-cost professional edge - but they don’t need it to be delivered in the same way. “Corporate” websites are fine for accountants, law firms and - dare we say - large corporations. However, not everyone needs this uber-professional presentation; it just doesn’t represent most industries. In fact, it doesn’t represent most industries.

Here are our Top 5 Signs Your Website is “Too Corporate”: Read the rest of this entry »

Baltimore City - not to mention the Internet - is abuzz this week over video footage of a police officer reprimanding a skateboarder, which ended up on YouTube. The video has divided all those who see it, from the “Way to go! Kids shouldn’t talk back,” crowd to those who think his brutality and reactions were way out of line, especially when dealing with a 14-year old.

What has emerged as a secondary issue from the incident is the posting of the video on YouTube. The confrontation occurred sometime last summer but has only recently become public via the popular video-sharing service. In the span of that half year, the parents of the teenager in question never pressed charges, the police officer continued to do his job, and nobody seemed harmed by the situation.

Now that it’s a public spectacle, however, the officer has been suspended from duty and there’s been fruitless scrambling in the media to locate the person who shot the video. Read the rest of this entry »

I clicked “Publish.” Now what?

Wired magazine has deconstructed the blogging process in their latest issue, following your blog post from the moment you publish it, all the way around the world as aggregators (feed readers like RSS), scrapers (spam blogs) and spiders (search engines) all chew on your information.

What’s darkly funny about the process - and anyone who has ever tried to run a commercially successful blog, rather than just a personal journal, will tell you this - is that the reader is the absolute last person considered in this process. Marketing a blog is not about how many hits you get or how many people are commenting, but rather who is linking to you (and in what way) and how important Google’s algorithms perceive you to be. Read the rest of this entry »

In the midst of awards season, this is an honour you don’t want to win: Small Business Web Coach Craig Dewe has published a list of the “5 Worst Web Designers in the World.”

Dewe’s list includes “professional” sites with nested tables, frames, scrolling marquees, flashing backgrounds, and lots of other outdated graphical tricks that novice designers played with in the 90s - the difference being, of course, that these companies want to take your money for their web design “skills.” Read the rest of this entry »

Never underestimate the power of blogs. A decade ago, few knew they existed; now they number in the millions. If you still think blogs are just online journals, think again.

Companies have been using blogs for SEO-friendly marketing for several years now and have since expanded these efforts into paid posting ventures through companies like PayPerPost. Through third parties, advertisers pay bloggers to write about their companies and services, generating valuable marketing buzz in cyberspace.

PayPerPost, founded in 2006, is one of the leaders of the blog advertising and paid posting revolution. Qualifying bloggers - known as Posties - can sign up to write sponsored content on a wide range of subjects specific to their target audiences. Each post is reviewed for quality, length and requested features (advertisers may request a video, a link, or other tidbits) and Posties receive Paypal payments for completed assignments. Read the rest of this entry »