November 13th, 2012
Frequently I received phone calls and emails from small business owners who need updates done to their websites. I ask them what happened to their website’s original designer, and answer is always the same: “they disappeared, I tried to reach them but they won’t answer my email/phone calls and I need changes to my website”.
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Posted in Rants | Comments Off on Why Do Web Designers Disappear After Your Website is Done?
March 9th, 2011
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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Posted in Rants | 6 Comments »
November 11th, 2010
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…
Posted in Rants | 3 Comments »
November 1st, 2010
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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Posted in Rants | Comments Off on How Many People Use The Internet?
October 29th, 2010
I had two interactions with small business owners this week that really caused me to pause and wonder what year it was. Small business owners NEED an online presence – a website, and they need a nice professional one too.
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February 11th, 2009
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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Posted in Rants | Comments Off on Google Map Spam – New Private Reporting Form
January 16th, 2009
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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Posted in Rants | 12 Comments »
January 8th, 2009
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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Posted in Rants | 28 Comments »
January 5th, 2009
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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Posted in Rants | Comments Off on Google Map Spam – Multiple Listings By The Same Company
November 2nd, 2008
How do you know what a domain name is actually worth? If you want to buy it, how do you know whether you’re paying too much for it? 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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Posted in 1st Steps, Rants | 6 Comments »
