For all of you out there who are guilty of this (and you know who you are) shame on you. Learn how to communicate and stop being so annoying!

I call this Swarm Email and it gets on my nerves maybe it does to you too. Why? Because it wastes my time. Now I have to deal with every cotton picking message. It’s so painful it makes me considered deleting them all. Especially because of the nonsensical and broken sentence structure (let’s not forget an overload of cut and paste). Would you believe I get this drivel from authors who write books? What has happened to clean clear concise communication?

One method of dealing with Swarm Email is to chuck the whole group of messages into a folder with the person’s name on it. It is so nice having a clean inbox and the Swarm Email is tucked neatly away in a sort of  Email Purgatory.

I know why some people do this. I think it is because they desperately need to get every unfocused crumb of thought off their plate. I know this because I occasional get this reply; “I already sent you an email about this.” Oh really? Now I have to go look in the dumpster for it. Maybe I should challenge you to verify that you actually sent it so that you too can dance in the rubble with me. No, please just send me a hundred more emails, I love the attention.

I have nothing against iPhones, but only in the way people use them. I seem to get much better email messages from Blackberry users. Ever since the iPhone first came out I would start seeing emails with nothing in them. Oh wait! The message was in the Subject Line. How convenient. Except the sentence gets cut off because of the character limit. So what were you trying to say?

This brave new world of smart phones and iPads seems to be killing communication itself when it was suppose to enhance. It’s not the technology. It’s the laziness of people. Communication is so accessible that we have lost the will to perfect the message. It makes me exhausted having to communicate back all of the time; “What do you mean?”, “Can you be more specific?” or “Why is this relevant?”.

Perhaps communication is a lost art an has gone the way of the quill pen. Is this a pet peeve of yours? Or am I the only one that gets Swarm Email?

If you are not a professional writer/word smith, and I know that most of you are not, the effort you are taking to submit articles, press releases and even blogging could be in vane. We are now deeper into the information age and data overload and info-kluge is starting to get out of hand.

Are you just trying to get traffic? Or are your trying to make money? There is a huge difference. Social media is a very good example of spinning your wheels, you don’t know what you are doing, but everyone is doing it. There is nothing wrong with that unless it dawns on you one day that you are wasting time with bad marketing.

Good marketing means converting “lookers” into “buyers”, convincing the average Joe that your solution has the best value. So take a good look at your value proposition. Can’t find it? Is it on your web site? Oh yes, of course it  is somewhere three clicks deep in a pile of relentless nonsense.

This is probably not the case for you. Perhaps we should make sure. Do yourself a favor and find 3 marketing companies and ask them to evaluate your web site’s home page sales copy. Of course they want to sell you services, but let them show off and show you how smart they are. Why 3? To get a clearer picture of what is wrong with your web site in an unbiased yet professional way.

Hiring a good writer would be a good place to start. Why? because with a good script in hand your message can reverberate through the web site graphics, the inbound links and the social media outlets in a consistent and compelling manner.

How do you find a good writer? That is a good question and I am glad you asked because now you are thinking like a smart entrepreneur. The key qualities I look for is, use of good keyword phrases, descriptive words that paint the proper picture, and flow. I want the reader to enjoy what they read and I want them to feel the need to come back for more. Plus I want them to click the “Like” button without me asking them to.

You may need to try out a few writers until you find one that has the sizzle that you are looking for. Consider putting together a small focus group of friends and get their opinions. Remember you are too close to your business to see the flaws.

I admit I could use better writers myself. So I am always looking for them and trying them out. If you would like me to refer you to some professional writers with sizzle, simply contact me.

Social is just a buzz word meant to confuse you into spending lots of money. Web marketing is a highly unregulated industry and a sucker is born every minute. Let’s make social easier to understand. We can do that be replacing the concept of social with the concept of doing.

Marketing is the act of doing. So what are we doing? In the information age we are simply putting out information. The doing part consists of typing and looking for places on the web to type information about your company or product offering.

Look for information outlets. These can be more than just social sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can make comments on someone’s blog. You can find a business directory and add yourself there. Write and article and submit it to a dozen different article directories.

Once you train your eyes how to see opportunities on the web for free or inexpensive input the possibilities become endless. And anyone can do this themselves. Really.

If you fight technology and the work ethic, you will be left in cyber dirt. Yes, it is work, lots of work. Understanding that you have to put information out there, anywhere, is half the battle.

Now you know the dirty little secret. So, you could hire a social media company for many thousands of dollars or you could spend your money more wisely. Consider hiring young journalists. These kids love to write and know the internet. Hire them if you do not have the time to do this yourself.

The problem comes in when you are promoting a message online. The keywords you use to promote organic search most undoubtedly will include your business name, product name and even your own name. What if you secretly like to crochet and you sign up for a meetup with others who also like to crochet? You might inadvertently use your own name and possibly your business name because why would you not want to promote your business every chance you get?

After a few weeks pass and you are checking your web site’s search results, you find that the profile page for the crochet meetup is above even your own web site that you have been promoting. Yikes! You didn’t want anyone to know that you like to crochet. That was suppose to be your private escape. Now, anyone who searches your name or business name see that you like to crochet because that meeyup profile is way on top of the search results for your web site.

How can this be happening? The reason is because most mature social sites have many exterior links pointing to them because many of their members are linking back to their meetup. The may be linking back to the social site in order to validate their persona or to promote their group. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just the nature of the social network mechanism. All those links back to the social site are like votes to Google. To Google this is a very popular site and is probably what most people are looking for. If you name is attached to it some how, Google thinks the social site is the most relevant for your business name.

What can you do if you don’t like your profile pages to out-rank your main web site on Google search results? First, consider being more anonymous if you are joining a social site that you wouldn’t want anyone to know that you are joining. Use false information. On the web there is no rule that says you have to be honest. I know it sounds odd. If you want to promote yourself you should use social sites to help you get expose. My proposal is to consider the consequences of doing so.

If there has been SEO damage with profiles that you have signed up with, here are a couple of things you can do. Go and login to our profiles and update the information to throw them off of your brand. Google will eventually re-index the profile pages and the new information will cause the profile pages be relevant to something else. You can also contact the administrator of the site and have them remove the account all together.

Besides, in the end, do you want to promote social sites or your own!

Not many entrepreneurs are good at everything they have to do to run their business. Advertising is one of those areas that is a real art and not many are skilled at taking mundane offerings and making them exciting. In effect, the more promoting you do on Facebook the more friends you are more likely to lose. They are hiding you and you don’t know it. When advertising anywhere on the web you must look for ways to measure the success of your investment. Couple that with a compelling offering and you will find better results.

If you are not sure about your current offering’s effectiveness, do your self a favor and get some strangers to review your offering to give you feedback on it. Your friends may be too biased. If you can’t find strangers, than contact a friend who can find strangers for you.

There is a Silver Bullet

For those of you who are always looking for that Silver Bullet, here it is at Facebook. Because there are more than 500 million Facebook users, the best way to get your offering in front of them is to use the Facebook’s pay-per-click advertising tools. Pay-per-click is much more effective than just posting to friends and you get enormous exposure. It would be worth your time to look at it. Since Facebook and it’s pay-per-click advertising engine is still in its infancy the price per click is much less than Google’s.

Facebook was smart with gathering “Like” data as it can help you place your ad in front of the right demographic for even better results.

In fact, consider doing both a Facebook PPC and a Google PPC campaign and compare the results. Either way you will pushing tons of traffic to your web site and that can’t be bad.

Is this for you or your business?

It’s great hooking up with old friends from years past and keeping up with your current friends, after all they call it social media don’t they? They don’t call it business media. So if you take your business seriously, and I’m sure that you do, you need to identify business forums where your offering is looked at for evaluation not as just spam.

It is SPAM.

Just when you thought you had your email humming perfectly, now all of the sudden you are deluged with friend requests and invites to things you are not interested in. By joining all these social outlets you have just pierced your corporate email veil. Now the marketers parade right into your inbox. Actually they are more like multi-level marketers. Annoying isn’t it?

Sure, you can adjust your notification settings if you enjoy micro managing every little thing that comes across your desk. Now is the time to re-evaluate social media. Remember who is pushing this stuff on you, they are pseudo marketers. I call them pseudo because they are hunting for your money and confusing you with a bunch of nonsense. Yes this is the new snake oil of the 21st century.

Don’t Drink It!

It is also the new Koolaid, because everyone is forcing this down your throat. Why do they do this? Because nobody wants to be left out of the group. Notice how the tv and radio news try to validate themselves by mentioning that you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook. Really? You have that much time on your hands. These talking heads are really that interesting? That is the Koolaid I am talking about. It’s a weak ploy to be in the “IN” crowd. Of course everyone is doing it…

We are constantly selling things that have absolutely no value. The time to jump off this train is now before it consumes you to the bone. Be unique. Be anti-social.

Brand Association

Your associations do count. If you feel that you need credibility by twittering and face-booking, all you are doing is jumping on the same bandwagon as everyone else. Where is your uniqueness? What about an association that means something, like a business chamber or charity?

Blog My Brother!

And here is the biggest tragedy of them all, the time and money that is wasted on social media would be much better spent on adding new content to the company blog or web pages. The action is the same, but companies are wasting it on the social media noise box. The best way to use social media is to pull people away from it and bring them closer to your company and brand. Let us not forget that Google is where everyone still goes first for information.

Google should not have included Facebook and Twitter on the search algorithm. All it did was kludge up the search results with more garbage.

Join the revolt and unplug from social. Take back control of your life, your time and your money. Don’t let them fool you. These pseudo marketers are looking for idiots.

However, no company can be good at everything. So, while they are a great digital partner for your domain name needs, they lack proficiency with other common web services.

Web Hosting at GoDaddy

For many years most businesses had only needed simple websites based on static html web pages. GoDaddy provides very inexpensive web hosting with lots of bells and whistles. This is great for the bottom line for the small business.

These days even small business are requiring web sites that run with content stored on a database. This is due to the emergence of Content Management Systems that allow the web site owner to interact with their website to edit and add page content. WordPress and Joomla are both very popular systems to base your database driven website.

Unfortunately, database driven web sites put a lot of demand on servers. With so many thousands of web sites being upgraded from static pages to dynamic systems with blogs, forums and photo galleries, the load drives down performance. This means that pages load slower on the browser and editing content becomes very frustrating when have to wait for the server.

We are not bashing GoDaddy here. We love the company and we are quite aware of all the negative posts all across the web about service and performance. Most are unfounded. Our point is that business is business. As a business owner, knowing where and why to spend dollars is crucial to your web site expectancy.

Unfortunately there is too much server load on the GoDaddy servers for database driven sites. I invite anyone to prove me wrong because as a veteran web developer for over 12 years, I publish sites on a variety of web hosting servers and the difference is very apparent.

Google will also penalize you if your pages load slowly. So, if search engine traffic matters to you then you might want to consider using GoDaddy for domain registration (which they are very good at) and using a different web host for your web site that is not overloaded and can render your web pages quickly. You can easily point your domains to serve up pages on a different server. In this way you have the best of both worlds.

Email on GoDaddy

When you host a web site on a server and you want to use domain oriented emails, these are emails like this: bob@mydomainname.com, the hosting server also hosts the email account.

This can be changed via MX records. This is short for Mail Exchange. Here is an example: When you have your domain registered at GoDaddy and you have your web site hosted on a server outside of GoDaddy, but you want to have GoDaddy host the email account, you can point to the mail server on GoDaddy via MX from your web host server.

GoDaddy email is wonderful and can be combined with file storage and online fax services with little cost. However, I get a lot of calls from my clients saying their email is down and that they can’t get their email. There maybe other 3rd parties involved which could be contributing to the problem. For example: an Internet Service Provider like Cox.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about that. We build web sites, we do not control the flow of email. A good rule of thumb is this: if your email worked yesterday and you have made no changes to your email account or your computer, all things being equal, it is probably a temporary situation.

From my experiences, email services at GoDaddy are down quite often. There are many factors involved, but my experience as been much better with other web host servers. Which is too bad because GoDaddy does have a great web mail product.

This is another reason why many people prefer to use 3rd party email programs like AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail.

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Use a variety of internet venders for precisely what they do best.

The difference is that you are not going back to scratch. Web design also includes layout where “tuning” does not. With tuning you are only updating color and images.

In the case of CMS (Content Management Systems) you want to first pick a template. There are templates are specific to CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others.

When you find a template you like, you picked it because it had the desired layout and maybe color scheme that is closest to what you had in mind. A template tuner will modify the colors and images to better match your company’s brand.

For non-CMS web sites, these are static websites without a back end management system, the existing design can be tweeked or in some cases overhauled to be more streamlined.

Don’t think of templates as cheap. They are part of the process of website development and cut development time considerably. There are many places to get premium templates that are very nice. A web graphics specialist can “tune” the template to make it even better.

Also, there are templates that are meant for regular websites. However, be careful! Many web site owners think that the template they want to purchase has special features like “search” or “login”. They think wow for only $80 bucks that is a bargain! What they don’t realize is that the templates are displayed as mock ups. Just like fake TV sets in a model home, they are not real. It is just to show you how the feature would look and where the features are placed. Yes, disappointing, I know.

So if you are thinking of putting up a brand new web site, do some shopping and see if there is a template that represents what you are envisioning. To be safe, ask your web person if the template you want to purchase is a good one. They may be able to use it with modifications and “tune” it for you better.

Is Bigger Better?

Fast forward to the present and big screens and high resolution is the order of the day. So how do we determine what size to make our web pages? It depends on your target client. If your target client is high tech then you can design your site large. In other words, you want to make use of the technology and you have decided that if the user can’t deal with it, they are not really your target client.

If your target client is elderly they may not see items on the right that go beyond their monitor resolution. Chances are they have an old computer. There will be other issues like font size and color that you need to think about because this type of client does see to well.

Common Ground

Being a web designer, I see more websites than the average surfer plus I have a trained eye. Over the years I have witness subtle shifts in design trends. Many new sites are quite large especially online magazines and news sites. For now, I believe the common trend is about 960 pixels for the average website. It accommodates both the new and old monitors resolutions.

It is also best to center your page to “float” on an expansive background. This way you may have some color or pattern left and right of your page. Any time I see a page aligned to the left I immediately think “amateur”. Left alignment is very 90s and is almost never done these days.

Still Wondering what a Pixel Is?

For web graphics a pixel is a unit, but its size is relative to how it is displayed. For example a low resolution monitor shows jagged edges because you are actually seeing the pixels. Think back to the 80s with video games they were very pixelly. Now with high resolution monitors edges look clean. That is because the pixels are very small. For that matter we need to make larger graphics for larger pages.

In terms of print, about 300 pixels makes a good clean inch. The more pixels per inch the sharper that image will be. For example 600 pixels per inch. Depending on the application the human eye won’t notice any difference with higher pixel-per-inch values. It just becomes unnecessarily wasted bytes.

If you are still confused about pixels I invite you to see this old article I wrote about Pixel size.

Smart social media users will use avatars that are interesting. Interesting enough to click on. It could be art or something sexy. Don’t be surprised if the sexy female avatar is really a dude trying to get traffic to his web site.

Many of you are used to using avatars on Facebook or Twitter and you probably uploaded an image in your profile which in turn was used as your avatar. If you haven’t yet, shame on you. These are closed proprietary systems that use your profile image as an avatar, but what about the open web?

Introducing Gravatar.com! Now you can manage an avatar that can be associated with an email address. You can change the image anytime you want. Any where you make a comment, forum post or blog entry your avatar shows up along with it. This is a free service and may be a great addition to your online branding.

Signing up is easy and painless. Simple put in an email and verify it. Then upload an image. They even have online cropping tools so that you can make fine adjustments.

Many blogs and forums are Gravatar enabled and if they are not you can subscribe to a similar service. Gravatar is probably the most recognized global avatar system.

To see it in action go take a look at this post, scoll to the bottom and look at the comments section:
Many Webs Make Up Your Web Presence

Do you see who is using Gravatar and who isn’t?

Let me know if this was helpful to you.