OK, so you’ve got a new web site. How are you going to get people to come to the site?

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be the main method of web site promotion. But Web 2.0 has arrived, and now you’ve got a number of tools to use from the driver’s seat of your web site.

Here are some ideas for consideration:

1. Have a blog? Claim your blog on Technorati and get feedback on the popularity of your blog.

“Getting Started with Technorati”

2. Generate compelling blog content that relates to your web site business. Find an educational mission and write about it.

3. Use Facebook. Create a business fan page and post engaging, relevant content on your page. We post information that corresponds to our educational mission (helping people promote their web sites) on our fan page.

Keep your audience in mind–don’t post spam; post information that can really be of use, and interact sincerely with people who are in your networking group.

Social media resources

4. Post your blog entries on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Related articles

• Six Reasons SEOs Love Blogs (searchengineguide.com)
• Three Blogging Tips (best-tutorial.net)
• Build Your Brand Through Social Media (lazerpromotions.com)

Why use Joomla?

A Joomla site gives you the power to create robust, extensible, shareable web content without having to know how to program in html. It contains a huge amount of pre-built functionality such as event calendars, site search, ad management and many third party extensions such as shopping carts and galleries.

Why use Lakenetwork?

We can help define your starting point with Joomla. We create custom Joomla templates that are branded with your specific look and feel, completely original and to your specification. With a number of Joomla sites under our belt, we have the expertise to get you up and running fast. We also offer Joomla instruction and support.

Joomla Starting Point

So, you’ve got a new Joomla site–now what do you do with it? How do you create content? Joomla fortunately has a thriving user community and robust documentation. You can visit the Joomla Administrator Guide here. And this book seems to cover the basics of Joomla content generation and administration:

What else can I do with Joomla?

Visit the Joomla Extensions site to find just about any functionality you might want on your website, from social networking modules to e-commerce to user forums and much, much more.

Your search engine optimization (SEO) may be affected by two important facets: Yellowpages.com and the Norton Safe Search utility. Taking care of these requires just a small investment in your time or your web developer’s time.

It’s not just the phone book anymore

One of the great free resources for SEO is Yellowpages.com, which already lists your company information.

Generously, it also lists your web site address (URL)—but only if you’ve given it to them, and only for a year. Your web address must be re-submitted annually, and they won’t remind you. So if you want Yellowpages.com to link to your web site, you need to go there NOW and re-submit it.

Why should you care? Who uses the phone book now, anyway? People don’t go straight to the YellowPages site for information, do they?

That’s not the point. If someone is doing an Internet search for your organization, product or service, the Yellow Pages is one more place that your information will pop up and link back to your site. And it’s free!

Newest wrinkle in site safety

If you have installed the newest versions of the Norton AntiVirus utility, you will see that most companies that come up in a search have green check marks. Occasionally you’ll see a red X—don’t go to those sites, they are unsafe!

Quite a few sites have little gray question marks beside them, meaning they haven’t been tested by Norton. If your site turns up with this mark, you should be concerned. Most people won’t go to a site if it appears suspicious.

How do you make sure that Norton considers your web site site safe? If you have Norton installed on your computer, simply do a search for your company.

If your company comes up with a question mark, click on the mark and Norton will give instructions on how to submit your site. It seems that they take just a day or two to test it.

When we found out about this, we went through all our clients’ sites and submitted them.

If you don’t have Norton, you can still find out how your site is rated and submit it by going to http://safeweb.norton.com/help/site_owners.

So there you have it. Two ways to make sure the Web helps, not hinders, your search engine optimization.

The Internet is a slippery youngster. Take advantage of these tips to get the market exposure you deserve.

Horror of horrors! Last time we looked, we found that some of the search engines and sites are displaying the wrong web site address. They are sending people to www.lakebusinessjournal.com, which was our very first client back in 2005, rather than our own site, www.lakenetwork.net.

Thankfully, we are displayed correctly on the two largest search engines, Google and Yahoo. And our paid listings in the AT&T family such as Yellowpages.com, which we control, are also correct.

But the third largest search engine, Bing.com, somehow picked up the wrong information.

It looks like the culprit is Citysearch.com, one of the places that Bing gathers its information.

Although it is relatively easy to change information on these listings such as addresses and your company’s products and services, we’ve learned that changing the web site address is a different kind of animal.

We have submitted online requests to both Citysearch and Bing with no luck so far. As you have probably guessed, we’ve not been able to make contact with a single human being on the other end.

We are having a similar problem with the listings for our church, which has the same name as a church in Oregon. Guess where Yahoo directs people, in spite of our best efforts to change it? Oregon, of course. At least Google got it right.

It’s unfortunate that wrong information on the Internet spreads virally–like the worst kind of gossip.

We’ll keep you posted and let you know when we’ve had success in changing our information. Meanwhile, here are two bits of advice:

1. Do a search in Google, Yahoo and Bing for your company name, your products, your market area and so forth to see if people are getting the correct information.

2. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet!

Web site developers have absolutely no control over the software that will end up viewing their Web site. As a Web site owner, you need to be aware of the complications involved in viewing your site. As an Internet user, you need to be aware of the hidden issues brought on by not updating your browser regularly.

There’s a good chance that you yourself are using either Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 or 6, but there are many other options out there. As it stands, Mozilla’s Firefox is a strong third in the browser wars, with Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and now Internet Explorer 8 filling in the minor ranks and nine more that are too insignificant to list. Not including the smart phone market, that leaves you with 16 different ways to view the same site.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was launched in March 2009, and already one percent of your customers have installed it or a previous Beta test version.

It is a good idea to have your Web site maintenance person test your site on the new IE8 browser. At Lakenetwork, we are systematically going through the sites we maintain to fix the few glitches we’ve found. Nothing serious, just annoying: missing borders, error dialogues when you hover over a menu, the content in the header being pushed down a few pixels beyond the header. Incidentally, when your site was first launched, your developer should have tested the site on a variety of browsers beforehand.

We’re going to get a little technical here, but our main point is to make sure that your site has no issues with IE8 compatibility—or for that matter, the remainder of the browsers.

So much choice for consumers introduces some significant problems for developers. What browsers do we develop the code for? Can we even get the feature we want in a site to work in an older browser? These problems are best exemplified by Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Released in 2001, there are many code features that IE6 simply does not support and will never support. Sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace that define the current generation of the WWW didn’t even exist when IE6 was released. Yet, with around one quarter of your users using IE6, developers are stuck creating workarounds to make new ideas work with old technology.

As a Web site owner, you should be aware that these problems mean that your site may not display on all computers as you expect it to. Sometimes these differences are minor, like an extra bit of space between lines here or there in your content. Other times they can be absolutely catastrophic to the point where your site fails to display at all.

At this point, it’s a good idea to have support for IE6, IE7 and Firefox. Generally, if a site displays well in Firefox it has industry compliant code and will display across most non-Microsoft browsers.

Conversely, if a site displays well in Internet Explorer 6 or 7, don’t assume that it will display well in non-Microsoft browsers. (Microsoft is notorious for incompatibility even in this environment.)

As a user, you should simply be aware that the browser you’re using right now makes a difference in the grand scheme of things. In the early days of the Web, browsers were introduced regularly and the more tech-savvy user base updated regularly. As the user base has spread to the less tech-savvy, fewer users overall are updating regularly. In this constantly changing, technology driven world, it really is every user’s duty to keep their personal platform up to date. (It’s even free!) But until updating happens universally—which may be this side of never– it is best to make sure your company or organization’s Web site is compatible with as many browsers as possible.

Much to her dismay, she discovered the Web site did not belong to her business. There it was on the contract: “The developer maintains the rights to the Web site’s design.”

She wanted out. She wanted a divorce from her Web site hosting and design company—but unfortunately she was locked into this relationship. Redesigning the site would cost too much. The retailer had learned a costly lesson.

This is not your usual and customary way that Web site ownership is handled. Usually the site belongs to you, the client. But it happens often enough that I thought it was worth a column.

Locked into a bad relationship

In another instance, a local membership organization paid a rather large amount for a software service that handles similar Web sites for clubs and organizations. In addition, they are locked into paying a monthly maintenance fee for three years.

The organization created their own site using the software, but they were disappointed to find that it didn’t really match their needs. It couldn’t be customized, and it didn’t have all the bells and whistles they needed.

They are looking for us or another Web site developer to help them iron out their problems, probably an expensive proposition. Can this marriage be saved? We don’t know yet.

Furthermore, because the organization is using proprietary software developed by this company, if they ever get the kinks worked out they will still have to use that company. If they move, more than likely they will lose their Web site. And then they’ll have the headache-y task of creating a new one.

This is not to say that the Web site company is unethical. They probably spent considerable time and expense developing the software. But it does present a problem for their clients.

“Free” sites

What about the sites you can create for free on some of the major search engines, who will host the sites for a few cents a day? I’ve always wondered about that, and I finally took a look. The design is yours to keep—but when you leave, the functionality stays. In other words, you can have the “picture” of your Web site—but you won’t be able to make it function, which is a major part of the expense in creating and maintaining a Web site.

Here is some excellent information from pbrainmedia.com:

“You need to protect your company’s ability to make changes to the site down the road. You should always think about — and ask prospective developers about — what will happen if you end your relationship with the developer in the future. If the developer creates the site with proprietary technology, you may find it difficult or impossible to make changes without using the original developer. More than a few businesses have learned this lesson the hard way and have had to create a new Web site from scratch after ending their relationship with a previous developer who refused to grant permission to the business to make changes to the code the developer owned.”

The rest of the article is at http://www.pbrainmedia.com/library/articles/webowner.shtml.

Also, you can find out about the copyright issues at http://www.chicagolawyermagazine.com/2008/11/12/info-tech-law-Website-ownership/.

Talk to others

In the wild and woolly world of Web site development, it pays to talk to friends and associates who have needs similar to yours and are happy with their developer. Make sure to ask one essential question: Who owns your Web site?

By the way, most local Web site developers don’t have a problem with your leaving the relationship if it’s not a marriage made in heaven. It just hurts our pride a little.

Changing Web site companies requires willing cooperation between the new developer and the old developer, and all of us developers know that. There are domain names that need to be pointed in a new direction, sites and functionality moved to a new host, access granted, and so forth. It’s not the happiest of tasks, but we all—well, most of us—know that we need each other’s cooperation to get the transfer completed. We know that while we may lose a client today to another developer, the same developer may be losing a client to us next week.

So we help each other out. It’s not only the legal thing to do, it’s the smart thing.

Important things to keep on hand about your Web site:

Domain name information: This includes where you registered your domain, when the registration expires and the cost of your renewals (generally in yearly increments), the Web site address, login and password to your domain’s control panel (very, very important, all domains have this, and it is required to make changes).

Hosting Information: Where your site is hosted, the Web address, login and password to the hosting control panel (if there is one), the ftp address and ftp login and password information (given to you by your webhost), as well as your hosting plan (how much space you have, etc. – sometimes you have to contact your host to have them provide the details of your hosting plan, but they should all do it).

Company Contacts: Your company should have administrative and technical contact people in charge of your domain name and hosting plans. If your company changes who is in charge or somebody leaves, make sure to update this information immediately. You may need this information in case you want to change hosts or domain names down the road.

An up-to-date backup of everything on your site: Keep an up-to-date backup of your site files locally on your computer or burned to disk. This gives you an extra level of security should a disaster in hosting occur.

Now is the time to gather the information, not when you have a crisis.