After talking to many business people here in Homer, I keep hearing the same story. Business is down. the B & B’s, the Charters, Restaurants, even the King Salmon Fisherman had a bad season. All are facing a difficult winter. Those who survive will have to think outside of the box to survive. For a chance to survive businesses must be willing to think outside the box and willing to make changes.

There are several resources here in Alaska that can help you do this. One is the SBDC (Small Business Development Center), they have many ideas that can help you find new sources of advertising and revenue. They also have workshops to help small business succeed. Visit http://aksbdc.org/  and see what they have to offer your business

We are looking forward to hosting a couple of workshops here in the fall focused on Starting a Web Site and Marketing on the Internet so watch the AKSBDC or use our RSS feed to find out more information. These workshop may make the difference  in whether your web site will make or break you next year.

You can visit our web site at http://gtlenterprises.com .

Yahoo and Bing (msn’s search engine) both recently updated their search engines. Now Google last week tested it’s upgraded search engine “Google Caffeine”.

The one thing all of these search engines have done has added emphasis to Web 2.o.  Blogs and Social Networking sites are getting greater recognition.

Bad new is your static site may not rate as well with the search engines as it used to.  But the good news is, with the use of Blogging and Social Networking you can increase the visibility of your site without paying for constant updates of your web site.

Have a Blog attached to your web site.  Your URL should be http://mywebsiteurl/myblog/,  not that of the blog site. Then sign up to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, mySpace and whatever Social Networking sites fit your business,  link your blog to each of your Social Networking sites.  Wordpress has a great plug-in that helps you do this.

For more information, you can visit our web site at http://gtlenterprises.com.

In 1994, online  journals got its start which was the beginning of online blogging as we know it today. The term weblog was coined in Dec of 1997 by John Barger and later shortened to blog, making blogging the grandfather to social networking. It is now the most popular and versatile forms of social networking available, whether you are using it for personal use or business applications.

The main reasons we, as a business, use social networking is to bring traffic to our web site and generate revenue. There are other reasons why you might start a blog for your business but these are the primary reasons.  So, with  that in mind, if your blog does not have your URL (IE: http://yoururl.com/myblog), you are not maximizing the traffic to your site.

Blogs come in about every flavor you can imagine, but for business applications there are only a few that are worth looking into.

There are some blogs that will allow you to do this, but the most popular and most widely used is Wordpress.  Many are even creating complete Web Sites using custom Wordpress themes.  My wife’s first Web Site was a Wordpress blog using her main URL address or index page as her blog page.  The benifit of this is that there are already RSS Feeds, SEO and other tools available to plug into these Blogs.

The next generation of Blogging in the industry that we are starting to see is Joomla, which is much more than a Wordpress Blog.  It manages content.  Joomla  provides you a dynamic Web Site where you can manage the content  and also make entrys – like a blog.  It is much harder to learn then blogging but much easier to learn then Web Design.  You can buy or get free designs or “themes”  that you load onto your Joomla platform and then manage your content.

If you want to find out more or are interested in a social networking site, feel free to visit us.   GTL Enterprises Web Design and Hosting  provides hosting that supports both Wordpress and Joomla.

GTL Enterprises Web Design and Hosting – Homer Alaska

August Special

• Hosting starting at $30 per year
• FREE HOSTING and DOMAIN REGISTRATION/TRANFER with any 5 page or larger web site design.
• 1 page web site starting at $199
• 5 page web site starting at $449

We also offer many other web design solutions

Visit us at: GTL Enterprises Web Design and Hosting

Proud members of the Homer Chamber of Commerce and Buy Alaska

Web 2.0 is not a new language of web coding such as .html or a new verson of the WWW, but it’s the way software developers and end-users use the web.  It’s take web usage from static style web sites to dynamic style sites using social networking, video,  sharing sites, wikis, blogs etc.

The term Web 2.0 was first coined at a conference in 2004 between Tim O’Reilly and MediaLive Int. Web 2.o as a concept of a user controlling his own data and interacting with other users.

Web 2.0 is more about participation and interaction.  Instead of  having a personal web site(Web 1.0) you might have a Blog (Web 2.0).  or post pictures in Flickr. or you might have a spot on facebook or mySpace.com . 

Visit O’Reilly’s site and read for yourself from the man himself about Web 2.0 and what it means to your business strategies http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

A couple of day ago I decided to google our company name and found a bunch of blog sites that had our blogs attached to their blog site.  So I clicked to them and they where re-posting my blog on theirs without any link-backs.  Come to find they are automated systems that harvest blogs on certain topics and re-post them on their blog site.  Biggest problem is, Google considers this duplicate material and if your site is not the first one crawled by Google, your ranking with Google will be penalized!!

But how to stop it,  The easiest way is to add a plug in to your site that automaticly ads a copyright and link to your site at the bottom of each blog. You can download this plug at http://yoast.com/wordpress/rss-footer/ and install it into your Wordpress plug-in folder.

Or, you can add the code yourself.  Collin LaHay wrote an excellent blog about this and goes into much more detail on how to do it yourself. I would recommend you read his article. http://collinlahay.com/2008/01/11/protect-yourself-from-content-theft/ . He goes into more detail about blog theft.  DON’T LET ANYONE STEAL YOUR BLOG!!!

FREE PERSONAL HOSTING PLAN AND REGISTRATION with a 5 page web site or larger.  Regular price $30 per year. This offer is also good with domain transfers.  Visit our web site for more details http://gtlenterprises.com or email me at dave@gtlenterprises.com .

If your desire to see statics of the visitors to your site, Google Analytics is a good place to start but not the only place to go.  The great thing is, it’s FREE.  It also tells you how you rank with Google and lots of other great details about how your site is ranked.  You will need to add a few lines of code into the head of your index page, if you have no clue how to do this you can have your webmaster  do it for you. 

First, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up,  you’ll also get a good overview of what you will get.  You’ll then be asked to set up the first page of your site (the index.html page) with some lines of code specific to your site.

You’ll need to add your site to the your account then wait no more than a day and you’ll be able to see what pages people have been viewing and if there were any issues such as bad links hit plus much more.

But another source of much of the same information can be found in the admin area of your web site. If you don’t know how to access it, ask your webmaster for the user name and password.

  GTL Enterprises Web Design and Hosting uses c-panel. c-panel gives you a huge assortment of data such as  “awstats” where you can see how many unique visitors, visitors, pages hit, and bandwidth used each day as well as visitors, pages hit, and bandwidth used each hour of each day.  You’ll see the details of all the “crawlers” that have visited your site and which search engine they came from. You will see which keywords have been used and who’s been linking to you and bookmarking your site. You can visit c-panels website at http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpanelwhm/.

In conclusion, don’t overlook your websites optimization.  Much of it you can do your self or pay your webmaster to do. Some basic SEO services at GTL Web Design and Hosting are put into each site we build and we submit you to the major search engines but this is only the first step to search engine optimizing. For questions about optimizing your site  or starting a web site contact us at: http://gtlenterprises.com/contact.html

We’ve just finshed our first web site built for a professional photographer, go check it out at our gallery page. http://gtlenterprises/gallery.html

Things to think about before creating a web site:

Why in the world do I want a Web Site?  To attract new customers?  To communicate with existing customers? To reach beyond my city or state? Or do I want to tell the community where I’m located all the great things about my little store? 

What are my customers like?  Are they High Energy, In-Charge type of person; are they laid back and relaxed or are they High Energy, In-Charge type of person who is looking for a place to kick back and relax? 

Where do my customers live?  Do they live in a big city where DSL is the thing to have or do they live in a smaller town where they are on dial-up? 

What do I want to tell my customers with my Web Site?  Do I want to show them what my B&B looks like on the inside and outside; do I want them to be able to make reservations on line; do I want to let them know I am open in town and to stop by and see what we’ve got on sale this week … there are lots of different kinds of Web Sites and lots of uses for Web Sites.  Make sure your Webmaster knows what you want your site to do before you start the layout design stage.

Do you want to be able to talk with your customers on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?  There are several different ways you can do this.  You can start a Newsletter, Create a Dynamic Template in your web site or you can change the content on your Web Site as frequently as you wish. 

These and many more questions need to be thought through before you create a Web Site or try to revamp an existing one.  Hopefully you will see patterns emerging while answering these questions.  I’ll be examining these (and other) aspects of creating a Web Site in the weeks to come – so come back and visit us!