You can feel it, summer is fast fading and the cool crisp days of fall are upon us. For many businesses in Revelstoke this means a changing of gears, a small reprieve before the onslaught of winter tourists and gear hungry winter sports enthusiasts descend. Rather than sitting back and waiting for winter to come, I have 5 great reasons why your business should get out there and get a quality website. (Now of course we would love it if you got us to build it, but get out there either way)

1. Online Advertising – This year online advertising dollars surpassed that of TV advertising in the US. Advertising follows consumers, and consumers are rapidly transitioning from dead or dying media sources like newspapers, TV, and radio to the web. If you want your business to take advantage of this you had better get yourself a website, because you can’t click on an online ad that takes you to a brick and mortar store. Want to advertise on Revelstoke’s hottest new media property, The Current ? Not gonna happen without a website.
2. Expand Your Audience – There is absolutely no cheaper, easier way for your business to reach a new market and attract a ton of new visitors to your store. For the price of a single fancy display unit you can reach out to literally millions of potential new customers for your products.
3. Affordable – Startup costs for a beautiful website are under $2000 and maintaining the site is under $300 a year. When you compare that with rent and upkeep for your meat world location you will be wondering why you didn’t get a website earlier.
4. Maintain Your Own Site – Web technology has changed a lot since the early days, the websites we build today are completely updated and operated by business owners and staff just like you. With little to no technical knowledge you can update and maintain your own website (for free) using custom tailored content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.
5. Your Customers Expect it – Anyone under 30 these days just expects you to have a website. They don’t have a phone book, and they don’t want one, they already make many of their purchases online, and they would rather read reviews online than go to a store and ask for an opinion. If you don’t have a website, they might not even know you exist. I read a tweet (A micro-blog post on the Twitter social network site) the other day by a 30 something that said, and I quote, “I don’t care if you’re a plumber, if you don’t have a website I won’t use you”

I hope you find this list useful, as always I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

This day, which to so many developers has been all but a dream may actually be coming sooner than you think. After stealing time, money, and sanity from web developers for over 7 years the end may be near for Internet Explorer 6.

Microsoft has announced that starting the 3rd week in April they will be releasing IE 8 as an Automatic Update to all Windows users running IE 7 or less. This is in sharp contrast to the release of IE 7 as a recommended update, something that you would have to go to the windows update website and deliberately download. Using automatic updates now means that even grandma’s computer, which some grandson turned on automatic updates for, will now be upgraded to a modern, somewhat standards compliant, browser. 

May confetti rain down from the heavens and the developers of the world gather together and sing kumbaya.

With this development the only lingering remnants of IE 6 should be office computers in giant monolith corporations with archaic IT restrictions, Windows 2000 users and, the ultimately dangerous, windows users with automatic updates turned off. For these stragglers, particularly the last group, I personally endorse the subtle use of IE upgrade messages such as http://update-your-browser.com/ and my personal favorite http://www.browsesad.com/. Clearly these options are not available for clients websites so in that case I recommend developers charge a surplus (something like 15%) for providing IE 6 support since supporting IE 6 really does add many hours of extra work and extra code.

Grab your shovel cause its time to bury the beast.

Ref: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/04/10/prepare-for-automatic-update-distribution-of-ie8.aspx

SeoMoz, the website synonymous with search engine optimization, is offering a $1 pro account to the first 5000 people to sign up using the promo code SUCCESS09. SeoMoz is one of the most trusted names in SEO advice, and the $1 pro account will provide you with tons of information and countless tools to help you improve your sites search rankings.

I obtained this information and the promo code via email, since I currently hold a non pro membership at Seomoz, and I have confirmed with their staff that this is a NO obligation offer and that you can cancel after the one month with no string attached. The website provides mountains of information, and the pro account gives you access to countless SEO tools as well as the ability to speak one on one with seo gurus.

If you think your site could be doing better in the search results, or you wonder why you might not be coming up as well as you would like for certain terms, I suggest you head over to www.seomoz.org/trypro and use the promo code SUCCESS09 to get your $1 membership.

With an ever increasing number of online shoppers browsing the web for products, that they may or may not have ever seen, touched, or inspected, the online review is becoming an increasingly important tool. Unbiased non commercial reviews, whether from experts or everyday consumers, enable shoppers to make informed decisions about their purchases.

This holiday season while you are busy shopping consider stopping by one of these 3 sites to help you decide if your purchase is worth the investment:

1. – if they sell it chances are customers have reviewed it. Many of the products I have found on Amazon contain anywhere from 10 to 1,000 reviews many of which are indispensable.
2.  – Buzzillions is a sort of review aggregator, that is to say it collects reviews from a multitude of other sites and organizes them into nice search-able categories. I have found their catalogue to be quite comprehensive and the site is very responsive and easy to navigate.
3.  – When in doubt consult the oracle. If you can’t find a review somewhere in the catacombs of the hive mind then congratulations because you may be the first person to ever purchase that product so do us all a favour and write a review after you buy it.

That is my quick list so please if you know of some other great sites for online reviews let me know.