Assuming that your budget falls somewhere in between $19 and $100,000,000, here’s an idea of what you should expect to spend.

Color me custom

Gentle readers, there’s no easy way to say this, but a custom design/build for your website will cost at least $1500.  Minimum.  Period.  And that’s a bare bones website.  No frills, no bells OR whistles.  Basic website, home and inside page.  Designed, probably not sliced.

In my mind, if you want a custom website, you should be prepared to spend up to $10,000.  It may not cost that much, but you should be prepared to spend that much.

OK, well, maybe I don’t need a custom website.

The odds of somebody seeing a website that looks just like yours is slim and, even if it does, honestly?  Nobody will care.  Using pre-built applications, services, frameworks and designs can save you a fortune and give you something that looks really slick.    There are a lot of possible choices for a semi-custom website including Joomla, WordPress and many others.  Templates are available in multitudes, either free or paid and come pre-sliced.  If you’re not committed to a creating a unique user experience with a striking, modern custom website, you can cut your expenses down to less than a thousand dollars including your hosting and domain.

Oh, goody, so what you’re saying is that if I do it myself, I could get the same results for much cheaper?

Screech.  All stop.  I’m not saying that at all.  In fact, I’m fairly certain that unless you’re already a web designer, you won’t be able to create an awesome customer experience on your first go.   What I am saying is that once you commit to working with a design agency, armed with the knowledge that there are affordable solutions available,  you can keep your costs to a minimum.

But I really think I can do this, I saw one company that offers FREE websites and it looks really simple.

I’ve seen those sites as well.  Make sure you read the fine print with these folks.   Most of them charge between $4.99 and $6.99/month for a 5 page basic, no frills website.  In many cases, you don’t own the domain or the design, so it’s best to check with the company first.  It’s true that they’ll have you up and running quickly and they offer thousands of “professionally designed” templates, but you’re giving up source control, SEO and a variety of other features you get with standard shared hosting accounts.

Seriously though, it doesn’t seem that difficult to me.

I hear this all the time.  The answer is that it’s as tough as you want it to be.  Hamburger Helper and Filet Mignon are both beef dishes.   I make the Hamburger Helper and it’s still only going to be as good as its ingredients.  Would you make Hamburger Helper for the main course of a dinner party?  Even if you happen to think it’s the best Hamburger Helper ever?  Even if you made it with your own two hands?  Even if you’ve never made Filet Mignon before, and it seems scary and intimidating?

Intermission

Check out this short video on the vendor client relationship produced by Scofield Editorial, Inc.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY

OK, I get it.  I wouldn’t serve the Hamburger Helper, I would serve Filet Mignon because I want my guests to remember their experience fondly.  What’s next?

Next?  Stay tuned, in our next post we’ll talk about what the best options available are for a range of budgets, technical know-how levels and objectives.  If you’re done looking, and want to discuss some solutions, contact us for more information on solutions for getting on the web starting under $100.

Despite the challenges that I’ve had managing SEO for Joomla sites in the past, there are only three tools that I could find for providing reliable, DIY SEO solutions.  Artio JoomSEF, sh404SEF and the Joomla SEO Patch.    My reviews are based on my own experiences with licensing & cost, installation, configuration and implementation of each tool.  Visit our hosted Joomla demo to read comprehensive articles on each of the SEO solutions.

Artio JoomSEF is a free or paid-for SEO and mod_rewrite solution.  The paid solution for Joomla 1.0.x is €24.99 as is the paid solution for Joomla 1.5.  The difference between licensing is in what you pay for.  Joomla 1.0.x users pay to have third party advertising links removed while Joomla 1.5 users pay for support.

Installation.  If you are committed to using Artio for an SEO solution, check to see what kind of support you get on older paid versions.  I recently tried to install a paid version of Artio on a small Joomla 1.0.x site with only 5 pages. The zipped files I had for the installation wouldn’t take (warnings of corruption) despite downloading the component several times.  The solution they presented in the Artio forum (to decompress and recompress the file before installing) completely broke the site I was working on.  I have successfully installed it on Joomla 1.0.x sites in the past so I’m not sure what’s happened.  Artio for Joomla 1.5 installs fine, very smoothly.

Configuration: All three SEO tools requires the same global settings to work properly.  Configuring Artio to start working is a snap and is easily handled on just a few screens., though some of the language is a little ambiguous (Disable creation of SEF URLs?.. y or n).  The JoomSEF Metabot – which allows you to set custom meta information, is located elsewhere and has different configuration settings.

Implementation: There’s good and bad for Artio SEF.  I really like the  feature that allows you to stop generating new URLs without disabling the component, something I believe is critical for large sites with a lot of dynamically generated information.  URLs and meta information are all managed in one place and easy to work through.  Configuration remains simple and fast for beginners while offering a lot of options for advanced users.

On the other hand, with certain components I’ve experienced bugs where the URLs don’t rewrite and redirect properly.  I also recently had a Joomla 1.0.x site crash and burn as a result of trying to install Artio.  I wish there was more to handle duplicate URLs and aliases, which are a major issue with any large Joomla site.

Overall impression:  If you have a large site with a lot of dynamically generated content, you pretty much need to use Artio.  The ability to disable the component without turning it off completely makes Artio my top choice for large sites, while the cost and complexity make it a bit much for a small or medium sized site.

sh404SEF was, up until September 7th or so, a free URL rewriting and redirecting tool for Joomla 1.0.x and Joomla 1.5.  The tool still exists, but has been sold/moved/changed hands as of this week and now requires that you register and pay a subscription of $35.  I sure hope they add some extra functionality here, otherwise – I’ll just stick with the patch.

Installation:  sh404SEF can be installed easily using the built in Joomla functionality for installing components.  Because you don’t have to use .htaccess, you can jump straight into configuring the component for best SEO. It also suggests that it works natively on IIS, which is good news for people on Windows servers.

Configuration:  sh404SEF requires the standard Joomla global SEO configuration before it will start working.  There are a lot of advanced configuration options, but I found the instructions very helpful in getting the component configured properly.  You can choose to run mod_rewrite with or without .htaccess and switch back and forth between them at will.  The difference is that without the .htaccess file, all of your custom page names will include /index.php/.

Implementation:  I had been using Artio for years, and just recently tried sh404SEF.  The control panel is laid out in a very similar way to Artio, so I found the controls familiar and easy to use.   For a new user, I think Artio is easier to navigate but I like sh404SEF’s functionality better.  On the down side, the meta information isn’t on the same page as the URL renaming/redirection tool, so you have to do a bit of jumping around between renaming a page and setting the title and meta information.  Because you can’t disable URL generation, sites over a certain size could encounter problems.

Overall impression:  sh404SEF is my favourite solution for the bulk of small to medium sized Joomla sites out there.  There’s a ton of functions for tweaking the component, the installations were trouble free and stable and the price tag is unbeatable.

The SEF patch for Joomla is a free or paid-for extension to Joomla 1.0.x and 1.5.  The patch allows you to add custom titles and meta information to all of your site’s pages, but does not allow you to rename or redirect page URLs .  The patch can be used concurrently with other SEF tools such as Artio or sh404SEF giving you lots of flexibility with your titles and meta information.

Installation:  The free version of the patch requires an upload via FTP to the root of your Joomla site.  You’ll be overwriting core Joomla files when you do this, so if that makes you nervous you may want to go for the €8.99 paid version which can be installed as a component.

Configuration:  The patch is just adding more options to already existing content, so the configuration is all stuff you would have to do to SEO a Joomla site anyway with a few extra bells and whistles.

Implementation:  All of the extra meta information is attached directly to the content or menu item, editing is super easy.

Overall Impression:  For a small, static Joomla site, this tool is perfect.  I don’t think I would go for the paid version as many of the “extras” aren’t worth the cash.  The simplicity that makes me like the patch also raises issues of scalability.  I wouldn’t use this tool for anything over 15 pages.

Final Impressions

Artio’s recent failure to run on a Joomla 1.0.x installation takes it out of the race for previous Joomla versions, though it still works fine on current Joomla versions.  For small sites with 5-10 pages, the patch is the best solution.   For medium to large sites with fixed content pages (no dynamic content) I recommend sh404SEF and for large sites, with a lot of dynamically generated content, I recommend Artio Joom SEF.

While all of these tools provide you with the resources to do proper SEO on your Joomla site,  you still need a solid SEO strategy.   Hosting Nation provides SEO for Joomla services in addition to SEO consulting and everything else under the web.

Well, the word they used was scammer, I added all the others.  Still, they suggest that the SEO community at large is full of people that stuff keywords, spam search engines and generally clutter the search engine results with a unique brand of useless crap.

Is it true?  Are we all scammers and charlatans?

In a word…  Yes.

I know.  You’re shocked and surprised, and awed, and amazed.   In one breath, I say that most professional SEO’ers are scammers while admitting to be an SEO professional myself.

The truth is that most of SEO is just a boondoggle.  I talk to people every day who were promised search engine glory and have yet to see traffic go up one bit.  I looked at one site where the client had paid for SEO – what they got were poorly researched keyphrases and an entire site made of images (that’s right, the text was rasterized right into the PSD, then sliced and reassembled).

Whether you choose Hosting Nation for your SEO, or someone else, you should be reading our article “11 SEO strategies whose days are numbered” before you do.

1. Meta Keywords tag.  Hasn’t worked in years, Yahoo! used to use it for information retrieval, but it’s doubtful that they do now that their search is powered by Bing.  Really, it hasn’t been used since 2002.    Now, I can’t prove this, so if you think it’s helping your rankings go ahead and implement away.  There’s one way to be sure.  If you don’t have them, add them and see if anything changes.  If you have them, remove them and see if anything changes.  I expect that nothing will.

2. Meta Title tag.  Right, so one tag on your web page says <title>your page title here</title>.  The other says <meta name=”title” content=”your title here”>.  The latter of the two is completely deprecated, only the content between the <title>  </title> tags is valid.

3. Toolbar pagerank matters.  Chasing pagerank is like going on a snipe hunt, even if you catch it you’ll end up with a bag of nothing.  Actual pagerank is extremely complicated and is always shifting and changing and is rarely an absolute number.  TBPR data is usually old, about three months old.

4. Submit your site to search engines.  Don’t.  Bother.  Well, don’t pay anyone to do it.  If it’s part of a package, ask to have it removed.  The way to get your site crawled and indexed quickly is to have a link from a third party site that gets frequently crawled pointing to your site.

5. Your content should have X% keyword density.  Another ridiculous statement.  Show me the evidence that a site with 3% density always does worse than the exact same site with 9% density.  You can’t, because it doesn’t exist.  Just write, naturally, about your product or service.

6. The XML sitemap.  XML sitemaps are useful if you have hundreds, or thousands of pages of frequently changing or updated content.  If you have 5 pages that will never change, an XML sitemap is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

7. Latent semantic indexing, semantically related phrases, phraseology.  Whatever the kids are calling it, it’s the process of placing keyphrases into your copy that are related to the topic of your page, but not the same as.  Suggesting that there’s a special skill required to implement this is pure hornswaggle.   The only skill required is the skill to write effectively.  If you can write, you can write for SEO.

8. Duplicate content will get you penalized.   What I believe is that while duplicate content won’t help you, it won’t hurt you either.  Search engines want results that have an original perspective on a given topic.  If you don’t offer an original perspective, they won’t rank your page, and I don’t blame them.  Would you?  How is your copy of the wikipedia article on the spawning rate of the pacific salmon contributing?

9. PageRank sculpting.  It’s the process of adding the nofollow attribute to certain page links to direct the flow of PageRank to more ‘important’ pages on the site.  I’m guilty of doing this on sites, especially my own.  I can’t say if it works or not though, it hasn’t ever made a real noticeable difference and I probably wouldn’t do it on a client site unless they requested it.

10. Paid links are bad.  They are not, I’ve seen them provide results for people plenty in the past and many SEO people that I respect and follow have asked the question “Can Google REALLY tell the difference between paid and unpaid links?”  The answer, of course, is obfuscated.  Search engines will never tell, but the evidence says they can’t tell at all.  Just don’t make it the core of your SEO strategy.

11. My final piece of advice is not to believe what I say, or what any professional SEO’er says.  After all, we all have motives such as increased business, or glory fueling our opinions.  Demand examples of success from whomever does your SEO and request specifics on how they achieved it.  If they won’t tell you, do you really want to do business with them in the first place?

Well, on webpagesthatsuck.com I found a striking example of a site that’s doing essentially everything wrong.  Wrong navigation, wrong design and layout, wrong colours, wrong formatting and wrong search engine optimization.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  So wrong that I was able to come up with a 5 reasons (immediately) this site should be removed from the internet.

The site is http://www.5safepoints.com/.  As far as I can tell, it’s a site about the Virginia Driver Improvement Program Academy.  I digress though, so here are the 5 reasons to revoke their drivers license for the information highway and put them on an e-bike in the middle of a field where they can’t hurt anyone.

Reason One:  Mystery Meat Navigation.

Do I click on the images?  The links?  Which links do I click on?  Some links take me to an external site,  some open new pages in new windows,  sometime the red underlined text is a link, sometimes it isn’t.

What they should have done

If you want to use a colour other than the standard blue or your hyperlinks, do two things.  1st, make all of your links follow the same behaviour across your website.  Second, don’t use that style for any other content.  If you links are green and underlined, don’t use that anywhere else.  Place your navigation in normal areas, in the header, the footer and the sidebar.  Randomly placed links will confuse people.

Reason Two:  Unless you’re a competent animator, don’t use animation.

Close one eye and turn your head to the left before you visit this page, viewing it in anything other than your peripheral will probably burn your retinas.  More mystery meat navigation and a horrible glowing .gif on their header.

What they should have done

Ditch the glowing header image, go with a Google calendar or third party scheduling service.

Reason Three:  Talk to the hand, better yet – don’t talk at all.

Webpages that talk to me are the worst of the worst.  If I want to hear someone talk, I’ll go to ted.com.  Worse yet is that there’s no actual point to the talking and it’s obviously not a human voice.  Some sort of speech synthesis module was used to make the voice say “thank you, click on a link to view and print directions”, just in case I wasn’t able to glean that tidbit when I clicked on the link that said “driving directions”.

What they should have done.

Just put the address with a link to the map.  Everything I see on this site makes me think of using a samurai sword to cut a slice of cheese.  Total overkill.

Reason Four:  Hidden keywords are soooooooooooo 2001.

What?  They’re using hidden keywords?  Gasp!  I’m always suspicious when I see a lot of unnecessary whitespace.  They had a lot, I mean a lot.  Sure enough, if you do a bit of clicking and dragging at the bottom of the page, the answer to the question of too much whitespace becomes all too apparent.

These folks have managed to cram in a full 1677 keyphrases into the whitespace of their site.  I can imagine the difficult time they must have checking ranks for all 1600+ of those phrases.  I even did a search for “23690 Yorktown 757″ to see where they come up.  Not in the first 50 results though, hmmm.  I so wanted to know more about that address.

What they should have done

This is a no-brainer.  They should have not stuffed their page with invisible keywords.  They should use real content to build value for clients and get those words off the page.

Reason Five:  Naming pages “Page Title” isn’t doing anything for SEO.

They should stop it, they obviously know what keywords they want to target, as they’ve stuffed them into every site that they’re associated with.  And yet, they have pages (like the FAQ) that have a title of ‘Page Title’.

Give or take, Google reports about a million competing pages for the term ‘page title’.

What they should have done.

They should have taken some keywords from here to use in their title tag.  There’s plenty to go around, I saw a few hundred cloaked in the bottom of the page.

Given time, I could come up with at least a dozen more reasons to slam this site, but I think you get the idea.   People like me, and you, will not just judge a web site but an entire business by how they represent themselves on the web.  Think about it, do these folks seem professional?  Ethical?  Not to me, and based on my interaction with their web site, I wouldn’t go near them with a ten foot length of Cat5.

For more horrible examples of web design gone wrong, visit webpagesthatsuck.com

Best of the Web in Graphic and Web Design.

Web graphics and visual design cover everything from vector design to CSS tricks and even typography.  There are some projects that stick out as particularly exciting that I’ve listed below, projects which I think are at the forefront of a movement taking us to the next evolution of the interwebs.

Less is More…

Many of the top rated sites on the web have adopted a minimalistic approach to design, favouring light, seek designs with rich media and content over slow or graphically heavy web pages.  I’m a big fan of the minimalist movement, sites such as TED.com and twitter have taken this approach with great success and the design community is awash with buzz over this new trend.

Six Revisions has a post on minimalism in design with their recent post titled 30 Light and Sleek Web Designs For Inspiration

The thing I like most about these minimalist themes is that they’re much easier to create than really complex or graphic intensive web pages.  Plus, once you have a framework for building content pages that you like, it’s easy to change it by swapping in a new gradient or image as desired.  If you haven’t built a framework yet, look to Six Revisions again for the article,  Coding a Clean, Illustrative Web Design from Scratch

Everybody Get Fontloose…

For what feels like an eternity, web designers have been limited to the use of the 10 (or less) standardized web fonts for their projects, those fonts are: Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Webdings.

While Internet Explorer is still behind the times, Firefox 3.5 has really stepped up to the plate with full support for the @font-face CSS rule.  The rule basically allows you to serve fonts to clients directly from your server, rather than relying upon the user to have the font in their system to see it.   Once this rule, or one like it, is accepted by all the major browsers we can expect to see a revolution in typefaces on the web.  Check out a demo of @font-face in action on Craigmod (FF 3.5 required).  If you have a penchant for typography like I do, check out FontShop.  They release free fonts all the time and have some great tools such as  typeNavigator and FontStruct.

Best of the Web in Marketing and SEO

Move over SEO, here comes RDF and other acronyms

The world of Search Engine Optimization should be expecting an imminent overhaul with the continuing rise in popularity of user driven sites like Twitter, and the need to organize and categorize that content for the end user.  All major search engines are looking to tap into Twitter’s stream of continuously updated information.  Rather than look to Google news during a time of crisis or emergency, better look to Twitter if you want up-to-the-minute updates.

To organize the information, I believe we’ll see a resurgence an older system used to better define information and content.  A List Apart recently wrote a 2 part article on RDFa (Resource Description Framework – in – attributes), and the W3C recommends using the attributes on your web page to define your content.  It’s reminiscent of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set which has actually been in use since the mid 90′s.   Not surprising, since RDFa uses the dc elements for certain attributes.

The immediate downside to RDF is also an upshot.  The XML syntax for RDF is too verbose for the average user to implement effectively.  If you really want to give it a try though, start by reading the wikipedia entry on the subject and go from there.

Want to know how your site will stand up to the test of time? Contact Hosting Nation, we’ll let you know where your site stands and what you can do to bring it up to speed.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH9vcZO9SKw

Marketing isn’t buzz words, and it isn’t a secret, and it isn’t carrying a Blackberry.  It isn’t using words like synergy, or dashboard, or KPI.

Generally, marketing is a slog.  It’s a lot of writing, or design, or research.  A good marketer is someone who can do all three.  Bad marketers do none of them, but promise results anyway.

Oh, and I love this quote:

Too insecure to sell, too stupid or lazy to create something of value.

I may write a book about it, unless it interrupts my naptime in which case I’ll probably just continue quoting it.

20 Business Lessons Learned from Monty Python.

Makes me wonder what other comedic gold can we look to for hidden wisdom and business acumen, maybe I’ll watch reruns of SCTV and get back to you.

SEO is about as voodoo as a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Mami Wata agrees.

SEO (search engine optimization for those of you who prefer the long tail) is an art often compared to voodoo.  It’s complex, there’s a lot to do, there are no actual rules (unless you count Google’s rules, which many people do).  Adding to the mystery are the monikers of “White Hat”, “Black Hat” or “Grey Hat”.  Nobody really spells out what’s WRONG or what’s RIGHT.  There’s no standardization, no universally recognized regulatory board.  Just a big ol’ free for all akin to the settlement of the Wild West.

It would seem, to the casual observer, that navigating those muddy waters would be as simple as building a rocket ship from match sticks and duct tape.  The truth is that SEO for small businesses and individuals, especially those not in an extremely competitive environment, is more science than art.  With patience, a little cash and the right tools you can get your site on the first page of Google.

How do I know?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  Before I came onto Hosting Nation as marketing director I was doing SEO and Search Marketing for small businesses.  I was personally responsible for getting first page ranks for over a dozen SMB’s, always with heavy time constraints and virtually no budget.  During that time, I discovered a plethora of tools and resources that saved me hours of time I could spend on getting rank.

Sit back and get your bookmarking finger ready, I’m unloading it all, starting with all of my favourite search engine tools and resources.  Ready?  Begin!

Search Engines and Search Engine Tools

There are, essentially, four search engines (actually, there are hundreds – only four really matter).  Those four (in order of traffic and importance for SEO) Google, Yahoo, MSN (includes Live Search) and Ask.

You can view any other search engines, including a list of the top 100 alternative search engines on Searchrace (provided by Alt Search Engines.  Some search engines to keep an eye on are iSEEK which won alternative search engine of the year in 2008 and one that I’ve been closely watching for a few years now called Hakia (Hakia didn’t make the list, but I think it’s a better resource for researchers and has a good understanding of natural language processing).   You can download the top 100 list in .xls format (or PDF) .

If 100 isn’t enough, you can also download the middle 200 in .xls format (and again, PDF).

Alternative engines aside, the big four – while each maintaining an independent index of content, have for years been inextricably linked in areas of advertising.  It’s only recently that each company has forged ahead with unique ad platforms.  When I want to view the current relationships, I always visit Bruce Clay’s search engine relationship chart.  You can also use the histogram to view how those relationships have changed over time.

Comparative Search Engines and Search Utilities, or, I Never Meta Search Engine I didn’t Like.

If you’re too lazy (like me) or working on time constraints, there are a ton of tools for quickly swapping between search results.

Soovle reminds me a little bit of the Groowe Toolbar, though Soovle allows you to perform simultaneous searches on Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Ask, Yahoo, Answers.com and YouTube.  Pretty decent tool for quick results finding.  You can also try Grokker or Clusty if you find yourself hooked on meta search engines.

While the traditional meta search engines, like Dogpile and Mamma are no longer widely used, they share some similarities with current semantic web applications and search tools like Cuil, Hakia and the Headup Firefox plugin – all of which aggregate different content types such as video, news, wikipedia entries and images.  Google is already trying their hand at this with the universal search feature they unveiled in 2007, but in my mind they’ve failed to create anything especially innovative so it’s worth watching the smaller players.

If you want a more direct comparison, try the Google vs. Yahoo tool.

A gaggle of Googles, or, 100 ways to find what you need, not what you searched for.

A Google (actually, a googol) is 1.0 x 10 to the hundredth power.  More accurately, it’s a 1 with 100 zeros after it.   Google (the search engine, named after the number) was introduced in 1998 by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.  Only 11 years later, they’re one of the richest companies in the world with share prices worth well over $300.00.  They claim the largest index, have the lions share of the market (over 65%) and collect one out of every four dollars spent each year on online advertising.  Pretty impressive for a company who’s original storage space was a box made from lego.

Humble beginnings aside, if you’re serious about SEO and search marketing, you better learn your way around Google’s index.   Clients will be checking Google for rank, and you’ll be monitoring for traffic.

You can do a lot more in Google’s search box than type in Brittney Spears or “What is Love” (Google Zeitgeist). With some advance operators like the ones I’ll show you below you can get to the heart of the matter more quickly.

Well, more appropriately, I’ll direct you to www.googleguide.com.  They’ve developed an extensive list of of queries you can use to refine your searches.  The complete list of over 40 tips, tools and advanced search options can be viewed in its entirety here or downloaded directly as a PDF from this location.

There’s also Google Trends, which shows search patterns over time (very handy tool for predicting search popularity), image search, Google video, news and 39 more tools and Google products.  Not in the list of 39 is Google Webmaster Central which offers even more features to understand and improve the Googleability of your site.

Beyond Google – Go Deep.  No, Deeper.  Deeper.  There you are.

There is a land beyond Google, a land where even Google dare not tread.  That land is the land of the Deep Web (or Dark Web, or Dark Internet, or Invisible Web – they’re synonymous).   While Google and other search engines only show the searchable or visible web, the invisible web (containing government and medical databases, libraries and much more) is approximately 500 times larger.

If you have serious research to do, do not pass go.  do not collect $200 and for goodness sakes, do not use Wikipedia.  Start out with this resource -  Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources. You can also use CompletePlanet to discover over 70,000+ searchable databases and specialty search engines.  If the 70,000 plus we’ve just mentioned aren’t enough, there’s also the librarians internet index, a government database search and ResourceShelf, a research and resource site updated daily by an editorial team headed by Gary Price.  You may recognize Gary Price if you recognize Chris Sherman – they’ve worked together on projects in the past  (Chris, like Danny Sullivan, is one of the most respected authors and individuals in the search industry today).

That covers my post on search and search engines.  There are many, MANY tools that aren’t in this list so if you have a favourite that’s not posted here, please drop a comment below and happy searching!  Next time, I’ll be unleashing all of my keyword research tools and resources.

When I first tried social networking at the beginning of this century with sites like Google’s Orkut, it seemed like it was just the same group of geeky friends going from site to site when we would still be using IRC as our main way of social interaction.

Facebook for me started off as the same but a bit more polished. Then, for some reason, it turned into a Classmates site that was free. Following a chain of friends I found it exciting to find out what people I hadn’t seen in 15 years were doing, and how the teenagers I remembered now looked like adults.

My greatest Facebook amazement is in its use by my family and family friends. These are people who don’t use computers much (some don’t even have one). As a type of multimedia notice board and messaging solution, its use has really kicked off and has become an accepted form of communication.

Now I think I have some new posted photos and statuses to look at.  What are you doing right now?

Links to Information and resources:

Microsoft Bob – Wikipedia

IRC – Wikipedia

Interested in trying IRC? Try mIRC Internet Relay Chat client

Randall Donald is the system administrator for Hosting Nation Data Inc.  Hosting Nation provides hosting packages and hosted applications to everyone.