Here’s what has worked for me:

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^coolexample.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.coolexample.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Create .htaccess (text) file and put at root directory level.

Now if someone leaves out the “www”, it will be put in, which is good for search engines. They don’t like to find the non-www and the www version, they want one or the other.

It was the first time I’d noticed them mention the word Aldebaran in Star Trek. I was delighted. For those of you who wonder what Aldebaran is, read this. I know, I’m a nerd. It was still a cool moment.

The reasons vary – but what really strikes me is the volume of web designers who will start a website design and not finish it. Or the web designers who after having gotten paid for the original web design, will simply lose interest in doing maintenance changes.

I realize website maintenance isn’t glamorous. But it’s vital to a small business owner because things do change. Sometimes really important things like phone numbers and addresses.  I think any ethical web developer is bound to support that business owner’s website for the foreseeable future, because a website is something that needs to be kept up to date as the business changes.

I also think there are web developers who are perhaps students, or other very young folks who learn how to make a website, but who really don’t want to do website development this for a living. So they do a few web site designs and then decide to pursue another profession – leaving all their small business website clients in a lurch.

I’ve been doing small business website design since 2006 – and intend to continue until I retire. It’s something I enjoy, and I have ample business experience (17 years working for Motorola) to know that the best businesses are based on customer service, and that means being available to do maintenance changes whenever a client needs them done.

So if you know why web designers abandon their clients – if you are a small business owner who has been left without someone to do small changes on your website – or if you just have an opinion, I’d like to hear from you. Leave a comment. I’m curious about this phenomenon.

I’ve put it on my home page, my cost page, my contact pages and my portfolio pages. Give it a try, help me learn before “real” clients use it

One of the neat things about doing small business web design, is that you get to know a lot about the companies you do the websites for. Working with small business websites is especially fun because you’re often dealing directly with the business owners themselves. You get to hear their passion for what they do.

It’s also fun to work with small business owners who are in the Seattle area, because you get to run into them as you go about your day. I’ve seen an electrical contractor van that I did a website design for, as well as a metal recycling truck whizzing down Hwy 99. Each time it takes my brain a few seconds to realize why the logo or business  name is familiar. It’s because I’ve done their website design.

Another reason it’s fun, is because you learn all about their small business as part of doing the web design. For example, when I did a website for a hay farmer, I learned that depending on the time of year, the nutritional makeup of the hay changes dramatically. Who knew? Now, I know a little more about hay.

Recently one of my small business website design clients switched ownership. I got a call from the new owners demanding passwords for everything. I hadn’t even gotten notification from the old owners this was happening. So I told the new owners what I usually tell small businesses that have changed hands – get this information from the previous small business owners. In many cases, the former small business website domain and hosting are in the name of the former owners. And while I may have the usernames and passwords, it’s not ethical of me to just  hand them over to anyone. So I redirected the new small business owners back to the original owners for the website domain registration and hosting passwords. Since this information is third party, it’s best that this practice is always followed.

Even when one of my Seattle small business clients loses their email password or forgets their hosting login – I ask them to retrieve directly from the hosting company. This way I am assured that I’m not giving out information that is not mine to give out – and with all the email hacking out there, yikes.

So if your small business website ownership is changing hands, make sure you get the website domain registration username and password, as well as the website hosting username and password from the old owners. Browbeating the web developer isn’t going to help – because we’re just making sure we aren’t causing a security issue.

For my small business website clients who are a large company, photos of each employee isn’t necessary. If the site has an “about” page, it is nice though, if available, to have a group shot, if the business is not too large.

But many businesses are micro-sized, consisting of only one person, and therapists fall into this category. Out of all the types of businesses I work with, therapists are the only ones who generally will be sitting with you in their office for an hour each week. Most other small businesses offer services where face to face contact is not this frequent.

This is why, I try very very hard to convince all of my therapist/psychological clients to put pictures of themselves on their websites. People who are shopping for therapists, frankly, want to know what to expect when they are hiring a therapist – and one of the things they want to know is what the therapist looks like. People are shopping for compassion – and seeing a smiling face can go a long ways towards communicating that.

And if you’re a therapist, or counselor, or psychologist or psychiatrist…and you’re thinking, no, I don’t want my picture on my website. You do realize that once someone makes an appointment, they’ll see what you look like anyway

So bite the bullet and get past the anxiety. Go get a professional picture taken and get it added to your website. The professionals who take pictures will make you look your best, and compared to a therapist with no photo, a smiling, warm, inviting picture will win out.

Web-Stat has many nifty reports that are easy to view, and one of them is daily downtime over any length of time. I ran this report to see my own website’s downtime from 2011-1-1 to today (2001-12-3) and here’s what I found:

Average Downtime : 0.21%

You can see that on some days, my downtime was 7.2%, which equals 1.73 hours.

(Calculation:   (7.2/100)*24 = 1.73)

Yes, on those days, if the downtime happened during my working hours, I was certainly concerned and emailing DreamHost. But they always got things working again. On average, my downtime is 0.21% per day, which equates to 0.0504 hours per day, which is 3 minutes per day.

So that’s my average downtime per day: 3 minutes per day. For me and my business, that’s completely tolerable given the low cost of website hosting that DreamHost charges.

You may see other hosting companies who talk about downtime in terms of uptime, meaning the percentage of the time that the website is up. In these terms, you could conclude that my uptime per day would equal 100%-0.21% = 99.79%

So if you see a  website hosting company advertising 99% uptime, you’ll have an average of 14 minutes of downtime each day.

If a hosting company advertistes 99.9% uptime, you’ll have an average of 1.4 minutes of downtime each day.

Again, this data is easy to get if you’re using Web-Stat as your website traffic tool – which I highly recommend – especially because it alerts you to when your site is down so you can notify your hosting company if they aren’t already working on the problem. The sooner you notify them, the faster they can fix things, and the lower your overall downtime will be. Web-Stat offers a 30 day free trial, and is super simple to add to a website.

Leave me a comment and let me know what your average downtime is.

You can easily use Google Trends to see when it might be a good time for you to take a holiday. Let’s say you’re a therapist. You go to Google Trends and enter the word therapist click the button “search trends”. This is what you’ll see:

Let’s zoom in a bit:

Notice how in the last quarter of every year, there is this large dip in searches for the word “therapist” and then how it rebounds in January? If you look over the years, this is a fairly repeatable trend.

So if a therapist is wondering when a good time to take a vacation or holiday is, they can use Google Trends to take a look at seasonal search patterns. And if you’re a therapist and you’re wondering why your traffic has dropped of in December…well, I don’t know why, but we can say by looking at the data that it’s pretty darn consistent. So take that holiday and don’t worry.

Give it a try for your business. Use Google Trends to look for seasonality in searches and it just might be what you need to give yourself permission to go ahead and take that holiday.

Happy Holidays everyone!