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 .

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

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

For $199 we are offering a 1 single page web site design and for a 5 pages site plus 1 year free web hosting and domain registration

Hosting starting at $7.00 per month or only $30.00 per year.  Visit http://gtl-hosting.com  for details. Also Check out http://gtlenterprises.com for web site development for as low as $199.

Content is King  – we’ve all heard that, but how do you write content that will get those awesome web rankings AND inform your customers about your business?
  
Use your Key Words and Meta Tags.  When setting up your Web Site, select Key Words and Meta Tags that will describe your Business.  Then use these same Key Words and Meta Tags when writing copy for your Web Site.  The Spiders will look at the Key Words and Meta Tags and compare them to the words in the copy.  The more they match up, the higher your rankings.
  
Make it short, sweet and to the point.  Experts agree that most people will spend from 15 to 17 seconds to decide whether or not this is a Web Site that they want to look through.  Make those first 15 seconds count!  Tell them why they need to stay and look at your Web Site.
 
Three to four paragraphs, three to five sentences per paragraph, and bold your topic (first) sentence in the paragraph.  I know, it goes against what we’ve been taught in school – but this is writing for the ultra rushed person to read.  Face it, how many of us have hours a day to search through a multitude of words just to find one or two golden nuggets of wisdom?  Not me!  So don’t waste words, bold what is important and people will pause to read the rest.

In the early year of web development before any design was even thought of, tables where used to organize data such as excel would use a cell to organize it’s data.

Designers took these tables and started using them as a design tools, placing design element into theses table grids, nesting one table inside another.  All your design styles were built right there on that page.  There would be hundreds sometimes thousands of code lines, creating a very cumbersome page of code that would slow the load time down.  Each page created would have the same codes repeated in many area’s of the site

Next came CSS (Cascading style sheets) Theses could be part of the coding page or a pages of it’s own linked to any web page that had similar design features. Now instead of repeating all theses style codes on every page, the page you looked at just referred to or linked to a master CSS page.

Even though the World Wide Consortium (W3C) still support tables in design it is considered old school design with limitations and huge amount of unnecessary code.

Divs Element are very similar to tables in the sense that you place your design element into a box however, divs allow your to created styles for each div that can apply to any div with a given name or specifically to a given div and you are no longer limited to the grid pattern of a table. The style can be created for that div and its html elements, then attached to an external CSS page creating a very clean page of code with very fast load times.

Divs also give you more versatility in how you place them on you web page giving a designer many more options in their design.  Learning to design with divs as more difficult than table and sometimes hard to visualize but is easier to use once learned.

Table based pages are not easily viewed for those using PDA’s or cells phones and don’t allow accessability for those with disiabilities that use special programs to use the internet. They are expensive and difficult to maintain. They also are difficult to keep consistent in design.