Facebook launched to everyone in 2006. It has become the commercial image of what we think of social media today. Yet here we are seven years later and there are still organizations that fear social media like the Black Death of the mid 1300's. Why?...

When I create a website home page I use it as a mapping tool. It should have just enough information to tell you what the page is about with links to other pages of the site for more information.

With so many pages indexed by search engines it stands to reason that any page can become the landing page and my projects are designed with that in mind. So to a degree the home page, while still important, caries much less weight alone than all the other pages as a whole.

Occasionally when I submit a home page design a client will approve it based on their idea that the visitor will see all the information fit within their screen. It's not until it becomes a web page that they realize this isn't necessarily the case and we have to have a conversation about the fold....

When people find out I am a web developer, one of the first things website owners will ask me is if I have some time to  look at their site and see if it's any good. My follow up question to them is usually, "What do you mean?".

Most of the time when someone asks me to look at their site it's because it's not performing as well as they had hoped, for one reason or another and are trying to find a solution.

Looks comes up a lot. But the way a site looks really has nothing to do with how it performs. I have seen some rather poorly designed and unsavory sites do great things for their owners. I have also seen some really well designed sites perform very poorly.

There are some factors that determine whether a website is "good" or not. Let's go over them....

I recently had a conversation several different clients that felt that social media was a mysterious complicated thing that they were not prepared for. While it does take a bit of time along with all the other things busy website and business owners have to deal with daily it's not rocket science and there's no magic involved. You can start using social media today by following a few basic steps....

In October I downloaded my update from Windows 7 to Windows 8. For forty dollars it seemed like a good deal. I had read about how Internet Explorer 10 was not going to be available immediately for Windows 7 and I had made up my mind that I needed it to test websites. I was silently applauding Microsoft for going away with the expensive upgrades on minimal OS (Operating System) improvements. I should have known better....

Blogging is one the greatest ways to gain links, page rank, and relevancy in search engine results. Google and Bing, heck, all search engines, like sites that have fresh content. And as an added bonus by creating consistent content for your site you also have a reason for the search engines to revisit as will as more pages to crawl which leads to more keywords that your site could show up for.

So in the spirit of content marketing we're going to go over some basics of how to get your content out in front of as many people as possible....

This is a reposting of an article I had originally wrote on March 2, 2012 for Giantseed Creative LLC. The basic features of tagging are the same as that of Blossom at the time of this writing. The only changes to this copy have been removing the CMS name from the text.

My CMS uses a tagging system to automatically link similar content. At first it might be hard to get used to if you've never used blogging software or social networks before so I thought I'd take some time to explain what a tag is and how to use it to get the most out of the CMS....

It used to be that if a business wanted to find out what people thought about them, they would sent out a paper survey in the mail and ask. These days you can still do that but what you may not realize is your survey is being conducted in homes, businesses and city streets around the world without even you asking for it....

With over 1 billion smartphones in use today, it's no wonder everyone seems to be saying you need a mobile website. Depending on who you want to listen to, it may seem as though if you don't have a mobile website you are doomed to fail. To me the whole thing reminds me of the when the first iPhone was released in 2007. "Oh the iPhone is coming out! Do you have an app? You don't have an app! You better get one or you'll go out of business!"

'Needing' a mobile friendly site actually depends on a couple of really important things. Before you go throwing a bunch of money at it make sure the following applies to your current website....

I thought I'd write a quick little post about social media since the conversation came up the other day.

A client was telling me how much she hates to enter, in this case photos, on all her social media channels and her website. That's when I told her she was doing it wrong....