/*begin rant…*/

There are so many things wrong with this I don’t know where to start.

I guess first of all I’m upset because this demonstrates a troubling lack of understanding regarding internet marketing at GSI.  Google Sites, Website Tonight, Webs.com, Intuit and the rest of them provide an inferior product that is essentially useless unless your website is for a senior prom or company picnic.  They do NOT perform well in search engines, look absolutely atrocious, and serve only as a loss leader for said big companies to be able to market their other high margin products.  Many of my current clients have come to me after long stints trying to make these things work, wasting time, money and sacrificing business.  GSI is doing their clientelle a disservice by promoting these operations.

It would also appear that the powers that be at GSI are unfamiliar with the Law of Unforeseen Consequences.  Did it occur to anyone down there how this might effect dozens of businesses in Spokane?   Apparently not.   Whether you meant to or not you just devalued the product of countless advertising agencies, graphic designers and web developers in front of thousands of business owners.

People are confused enough about the internet and how they can best use if for business and it does not help when a supposedly reputable source obsfucates the issue further by giving the impression that the kid who mows your lawn should be able to produce a functional and effective web presence.

I am not a GSI member butI can assure you if I were that would be a rapidly changing situation.

/*end rant…*/

First of all, it is important to recognize that the companies offering these “Roll your own” website services are not making their money by giving you a free website and charging you a few bucks a month for hosting.  These services fall under the classic definition of a Loss Leader.  Companies like Intuit and Vista Print are far more interested in selling you their other, high margin products than they are in providing you with an effective website, so get ready for non-stop sales pitches.

Another thing that they hope for is that you will become frustrated using their software and request design assistance from them, which they charge a premium for.  This happens a lot because the software is intentionally made clumsy to use.

You will find that there is a lot of fine print in the contracts involved…read them carefully or your $150/year website might cost you many times that.

If you purchase a domain name through one of these companies, you need to be aware that THEY control that domain while you are hosting with them.  Should you become dissatisfied and want to move your domain name elsewhere, it is usually an involved process that can take days, weeks or even months…with your website down the whole time.

The real world functionality of websites built using template based software is limited.  SEO is difficult because you have no access to the code and often are unable to tag images and objects with meta data, which is critical to successful optimization.  Most do not allow the addition of objects (customized buttons, javascript sliders, flash…all the things that make websites look cool) or if they do it will involve hand coding or at best copy and pasting code in the correct location.

The gist of all of this is, that on the surface, these things look like a great deal but like most things that appear too good to be true, there are many catches.  The fact is, getting a professionally designed, developed and deployed website does not cost much when compared to other advertising.   You should be able to find a designer in any city in the country who can produce a beautiful WordPress site for under a thousand dollars that will be unique, SEO optimized and have sophisticated features that you don’t get from the cookie cutter site factories.

Check out this post for more about why a WordPress site is ideal for small businesses

-WordPress offers a rich plug-in architecture that allows the easy addition of sophisticated features that can be implemented with a few clicks of the mouse. You can add calendars, schedules, banner ads, forms, log in pages, site search, and a host of other goodies effortlessly.

-The design and semantics of the WordPress platform offers a link structure that is Search Engine Friendly and offers built in tools that allow for extreme Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Generally speaking, no dynamic platform offers better native control of SEO. What all this means is that you already have all of the tools you need to fully optimize your site, resulting in higher search rankings.

-There are native apps for iOS, Android, Windows 7/8 and Blackberry that provide access to some of the WordPress Dashboards more important features. This lets you make minor changes to your site right from a smart phone, which can come in handy if you need to update something right away and are not in front of a computer.

-WordPress can act as both a website and a company intranet. A variety of user permissions and the ability to password protect any part of the site allows you to present both public and private pages. This allows for a company to create pages with internal functionality like employee schedules, time off requests, meeting schedules/agendas, special announcements and much more.

-WordPress is open source software, which means no paying for new versions. You simply decide if you want to upgrade to the latest version and click a button if you do.
See this post about updating the WordPress software or Themes.

A website on the other hand, is your castle, it is your island on the stormy seas of the internet, IT’S YOURS. Baring somebody hacking into your server, nobody but you can do anything to the look, feel or content contained therein. It is one of the last places on the internet where you still have complete control of the situation.

Last week for instance, the house that Zuck built issued a press release that basically says:
“In order to accomodate our new timeline feature, (which no one asked for, no one wants and exists only to allow us to further exploit your personal information) we are changing the entire design of Facebook Pages. Oh…did you have a really cool landing page complete with tabs that took tens of hours to hand craft and get looking just perfect? Thats a shame because it’s history at the end of the month.  Oh yeah, one other thing…you can’t use the new cover feature for any type of promotion (no ‘click here’, no 25% off offers, no contact information, no likes or shares…no soup for you!),  sorry that our new cover feature is about as useless as tits on a boar and that your landing page was bringing you lots of business, but that’s how we do things here in Palo Alto where no amount of money is enough.”
See for yourself:
Facebook 2/29/12 press release
Facebook Page Terms

This is the kind of thing that we are now seeing as SOP for social network companies in general and Facebook in particular. The social networks are marketing companies pure and simple and they pay their programmers wheelbarrows full of cash to come up with new and innovative ways to trick or strong arm you out of more and more personal information which they can then bundle and sell. No surprise there, it’s why they exist. Plus it’s a free service so they should be able to do pretty much whatever they want. The problem is if you are a business relying solely on that Facebook page for your web presence, you have abrogated overall control of one of your most powerful marketing tools to an entity that will not always, if ever, have your best interests at heart.

This NOT to say that Facebook and other social outlets are not crucial to doing business in 2012…they are…but it’s a mistake to rely on them 100% as they can also represent a single point of failure that can be extremely disruptive.

So I guess the juxt here is, maintain a Facebook page as your sole business web presence at your own peril. If you want to maintain control of how your business is presented online, then you need to maintain a professionally designed and developed website at the hub of your internet marketing that uses the social networks to drive traffic and interact with your customer.

NOTE: In the next week or two we’ll be bringing you some instruction on how to adjust to the new pages and offer up some tips and tricks to make the transition easier.

The one thing that a blog can provide ANY website is improved indexing by search engines. This is especially true if your websites content doesn’t change
often. Search engines love new content so anytime you are adding or changing relevant information on your site it’s a good thing.

Blogs are good places to talk about your product in detail. Your website is about selling, not providing instructions, so a blog is a great place to post
information about the products you offer. A blog can even act as defacto support forum, although it usually better to use an actual forum platform like
Simple Machines or PHP BB if you have to field a lot of support questions.

You can also use a blog to introduce new products, product updates, relate important customer news, etc.

Some things to keep in mind if you decide you want a blog:

-Keep your posts relevant…talk about your business, offer expert advise about your field, introduce new products or special offers, things like that.  Use your personal facebook page or a private blog to talk about your vacation to Bermuda.

-Post excerpts and link backs to your posts from your business Facebook, Twitter and G+ pages. There are some great plug-ins and apps that will do this automatically.

-Be diligent…Blogs take time to provide results.  At first it will seem like an effort to sit down and post every day or week, but if you focus on WHY you are doing it, it’s easier to get into a routine.  In time you will see the fruits of your efforts in more traffic to your website and a better repoire with your customer.

The true threat to your online privacy however does not come from invisible strings of code sent by some anonymous server somewhere…no, the greatest risk is what we voluntarily do to ourselves.  If you have a Facebook, Google, Twitter, You Tube, Google Plus or even a Gmail account, you are being watched.  Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he doesn’t give a damn about your privacy and is, with naked aggression, tracking, recording and organizing every single byte of information you post on Facebook.

Zuck’s not the only one, Google’s new privacy policy which was implemented a few days ago says basically this:
“We don’t care about your privacy and are tracking every move you make on the internet and selling it to our advertisers…don’t like it?  Tough, don’t go online then.”

Ever wondered why during a browsing session, served advertisements on some sites are trying to sell you something you were just looking at a few minutes ago on another site?  Aside from being kind of creepy, that is the magic of Google tracking software at work.

There’s no closing the gate now that the horses are out, and currently the only defense would be to stop using the internet altogether. Since any steps you take will be temporary at best, diligence is the key. Run a good MalWare/SpyWare program along side your virus software. Set your browser cache to delete cookies after every session. Don’t (and I can’t believe I have to say this) open unsolicited email, even if it’s from someplace you have shopped.

There you have today’s ‘Ray of Sunshine’. Hopefully my next post will be more constructive.