I have always been a believer that especially on the web the best way to grow your site is to give something away for free. I first noticed this very early on when many of the webs first sites gave away many different things to grow. The most successful ones gave away information. There were also sites trying to sell information, but these did not grow fast and seemed to fade away quickly.
Information can be the perfect product on the web. Once you create it or buy it you can sell it or give it away and then do it again and again. Storage (warehousing) is practically free and delivery costs are very low and getting lower all the time. I have kept this in mind when deciding how I was going to run my business. in fact, one of my most popular articles is called “Is It Worth It To Give Away Information?” and I have written several posts about this before. Here and here are just a couple.
What brings this back into my mind is a nice post on searchviews.com that I recommend
It’s is not my usual kind of post, but this drove me nuts all weekend.
I bought a new GE Adora washing machine for Christmas. I even bragged about how well this washing machine worked for me. I know, a guy and his washing machine, you probably hear it all the time.
This weekend the machine wouldn’t work correctly. The drain ran slowly and it kept shutting down because it was full of water. I tried and tried to figure out what was wrong, read the manual from cover to cover and even glanced at the other languages, but to no avail.
I am still under warranty, but you probably know the drill, call and make an appointment then sit at home and wait all day for the repair person to show up. Even if you are not paying for the call or missing work it’s still a huge hassle.
I don’t know why I didn’t Google the problem any sooner, but I finally did late Sunday night. The second result told me that the lint filter was clogged. It was a simple five minute job to remove the cover unscrew the filter, empty it out, and put everything back. I didn’t find any folding cash like some of the others that they helped (I found 6¢), but I am overjoyed to have my machine working again.
How can a company like GE have a filter like this that will probably need cleaned once or twice a year and not tell you about it? They have to know it’s going to need it. Are they looking to sell service? It sure seems like bad publicity to me and I might not tell another person how much I like their machine.
I’ll also visit and recommend the Instructables website again and again. Thank you so much for your help. This is a great site with lots of free help for many things.
The moral of this tale for me is, which side of this story would you like your company to be on?
I know where I want my company to be.
Here’s a list of some really great free open source software to replace many of the Windows programs that cost big bucks to buy.
This list appeared recently on makeuseof.com. I have written about some of these tools and others before, but there are cool new ones here. It’s also nice to have a list like this with all of these great free tools in one place.
It seems that a person named Jason Gambert is trying to trademark the term “SEO”.
There is no reason to believe that he will be able to accomplish this, but I have seen some strange things come out of our courts.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Skis-Direct.
A very simple site with only a couple of pages, but clean and easy to read with lots of open space.
The main picture gives the site some depth and you have no doubt that the site is about skiing.
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One of my customers who is a writer krahesnest.com asked me if I knew of any tools to help a writer organize their work. She knew that I am a big open source fan and thought that I could help her find something that would be an effective tool for a writer.
I found LyX it’s a very productive way to write books, articles, reports, slideshows, and other long documents. Word processors are optimized for easy use by untrained people. They excel at that.
LyX is a content authoring tool, LyX is NOT a word processor, and shouldn’t be used as such. It’s overkill for a 5 page school paper. It makes fine tuning of pages very difficult, which is not what you want on a flyer or short paper. LyX is not as user friendly as a word processor.
LyX is not easy because it is used to do difficult things, like lay out entire books in a consistent manner. LyX is a great tool which is free and open source.
This looks really cool. Google is releasing a beta version of Friend Connect, a service designed to let Web publishers add social networking features to their sites.
You will be able to add social features to your site without any programming ability. They will provide you with some short snippets of copy and paste code.
I have been trying to sign up for the preview release for several days now with no luck. I’m thinking that its so busy that they can’t keep up with the requests already. There are some example sites for you to see how it works.
I’ll keep trying and let you know what happens.
I heard from someone the other day who said that they specialized in “Creativity and Uniqueness” in their website design. I went to see what sites that they had done and to me they all looked the same. The sites were all done in Dreamweaver or something like that. None of the sites validated and they were all made in tables with JavaScript navigation for rollovers, black backgrounds, lots of straight lines and no shadows.
They all had some sort of Flash slideshow or YouTube video embedded, but creative and unique? I don’t think so.
I’ve seen quite a bit of this lately where graphic designers discover Dreamweaver, KompoZer, or even FrontPage and decide that they are “Website Designers” as well. Some graphic designers do web design very well and are concerned about usability and web standards as well as graphics, but if what I’ve seen lately is any indication most don’t.
The sites that I saw did all have graphics that were very well done. I think that graphics were by far their strong suit, but you can’t take a site design from 1999 add a slideshow or video and call it “Creative and Unique”.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Quinns Rocks Bed And Breakfast.
This site looks like a paradise. If I ever get to Australia I am going to seek out Quinns Rocks. It’s a small site, but in a very few pages it gets across everything that they need to. A beautiful and relaxing vacation place.
The site looks like a beautiful sea and has curves and shadows to give it some depth. The navigation is clear and easy to find and use.
More…
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I was thinking what to do for this wonderful achievement and recently I have had several potential customers tell me that they want their blog to look like their site.
When I tell them that I can make it look like whatever they want, they tell me “but your blog doesn’t match your site!”
I decided not to be the plumber with the leaking pipes in his house or the body man driving a rusty car and spent the last couple of days redoing my entire site. You may have noticed that there were no other posts this week.
I wanted a clean look that had lots of whitespace to make the reading easier and navigation that was clear and easy to find and use. Once I decided on a new design WordPress makes it pretty easy change over. I only needed to change 4 files and all of the 599 pages change, but the regular site is 160 pages (plus a bunch that I dropped) and I had to change each one individually by hand.
You may be saying to yourself “isn’t that what external CSS style sheets are for?” changing all of your pages at once. Well the answer to that is yes and no.
My site was the first job I did when I started this business over two years ago. I have learned much about seo, css, web design and my style has changed quite a bit since then. It also was made in several “layers” at different times and originally I just threw in the blog as an afterthought. Because my blog has become such an important part of my site I wanted it to look like it fits right in and my old site design didn’t lend itself very well to a WordPress theme.
Most of what I’ve learned make the site look better and also make my job easier when it comes to many things including changing the design. So I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the source of all of my pages and any changes in the future should be much quicker and easier (famous last words).
I’ll be cleaning it up for a day or two, but please let me know what you think of the new look. I welcome any comments or suggestions.
Happy 600th Blog Post To Me
