Blog Category: Rants

I just received a phone call from a prospective client that was so unbelievable – well, I just had to write a blog article about it. This business owner wanted a website, because they (wrongly) believed, that somehow creating their own website would remove bad reviews their business had received online. They had no understanding of how the web worked and were absolutely furious.

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Recently I had a prospective client who did appliance repair tell me that websites for small business owners are not needed, because when people need an appliance repaired, they always use their phone books. I told him I didn’t even have a phone book. He thought I was lying. Now I realize the white pages are not the yellow pages, but surely this article would have helped me win the debate: White Pages Face Last Call: Residential Phone Books’ Days Are Numbered

“Telephone companies argue that most consumers now check the Internet rather than flip through pages when they want to reach out and touch someone.”

I’d imagine the yellow pages will follow the same trend…

As a follow-on to a little rant I did on small business owners who don’t want to embrace the web, I found some really good statistics about trends in internet usage for the United States. Just so I’m prepared for the next time someone asks me to make their phone ring with new customers.

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I had two interactions with small business owners this week that really caused me to pause and wonder what year it was.

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Great news for those of you who have competitors who you think might be spaming Google Map listings (adding more than one listing for a single business): a representative of Google Maps has just emailed me with a new private form!

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I am frequently contacted by folks looking for small business web design. My business is hopping, so I can afford to be careful when selecting which clients. For those of you who are shopping for a web designer, I wanted to share with you the 10 most common non-technical things that will cause me to turn down a job – and things that just might help you avoid getting scammed by an unethical web designer.   I know these items aren’t unique to the web design field. And if you run a small business – these may be very familiar!

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Recently my beloved website traffic tracking company, Web-Stat, announced a new feature: Geo-Targeting. This nifty feature enables your website to automatically detect a visitor’s location and do neat things like showing a particular banner ad or other location-specific content. It also  allows website owners to block all kinds of traffic to their websites by country, state, zipcode…and many other things. I thought, hmmm, why would someone want to block traffic? The answer: Spam Prevention!

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Google Map Spam? What in the world could I be talking about? I’m sharing this with you because in doing some SEO work for a client I discovered this shameful practice of cheating Google Local / Google Maps listings. Very shameful and unethical. If you find a company that’s spamming Google Maps, use this private form to report it.

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Tonight just for grins and giggles, I decided to see who owned Aldebaran.com – it redirected to another website, which meant to me that it wasn’t being used – so I figured I’d contact the owner and see if they wanted to sell it.

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I receive link exchange requests often, and will share the most ridiculous ones I receive with you for two reasons. First, I want you to know when to decline these. Secondly, I don’t want you to actually hire a company that has people send out these awful, illogical, useless requests.

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I received a phone call from a very frustrated prospective client the other day that I’d like to share with other people who might be thinking of starting their own website design businesses or shopping for a website designer. Here’s a tip: Hey all you web designers! Take care of your clients AFTER you finish their website design. Sound simple? Apparently not.

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This article is written for those of you who are in the process of looking for a website designer. One of the good things to do when you’re shopping, is to look through the web designer’s portfolio. Most folks looking through a portfolio of websites will notice the obvious, like what the websites look like. This article was written to hopefully help you notice something a big less obvious: whether the web designer is using “real” domains, creating “sub-domains”, or “directories” for his website clients.

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If you’re like me, you do quite of a bit online activities that utilize secure websites. Shopping on online stores, banking, and investing all require a secure connection between your browser and the website you are sending your private information to.

But how often do you notice whether the little padlock in the upper right hand corner of your browser is actually there? This article serves as a reminder to always, always, always check.

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I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

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