WordPress 3.0 - What You Need to Know

10 Must-Click Websites

Say No To Outsourcing!

I get at least 5 inquiries every week from web development outsourcing companies in India. All of them make the same promise: use our quality web developers for your projects and save money. My response to these companies is always the same - NO!

Let me explain.

Over the years, working with offshore companies has always appealed to me. The US dollar, even at its low point, can buy so much more in India, so it seems like a no-brainer to work with these companies. But that is where the real challenge begins.

Language barriers, time barriers, work ethic and lack of accountability issues make dealing with these companies far more difficult - and ultimately more expensive than dealing with independent developers in the US. And it keeps the US dollar where it belongs. You truly do get what you pay for.

So, the answer continues to remain NO! I remain loyal to my Florida based group of programmers. They are not cheap, but they are outstanding at what they do.

John Delaney
Principal/Chief Instigator
Integrity Tech®

Geolocation Matters!

The mobile phone in your pocket is now about so much more than mere conversation. Email, the web and maps have become basic parts of any new mobile, and those technologies are starting to come together.

Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” and Twitter wants you to tell it “What’s happening?” but new social networks are focusing on a different question: Where are you? Services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Rummble allow you to “check in” at bars, restaurants, clubs, the local Mall and even your office so that your friends know where you are. You can use services on your mobile phone to find places that have been recommended by your friends, or by strangers.

Now the big players are getting in on the act. Google released a location-based service, Latitude, a while ago and its new social platform, Buzz, can track locations, too, and Twitter has begun to experiment with geolocation features. AT&T plans to enter the fray soon with Buzz.com (not to be confused with Google Buzz). According to reports, Facebook will begin allowing its 400 million users to share their location later this spring.

The days of people sitting in front of desktop machines at home are over. Sales of mobile devices, laptops and netbooks have overtaken those of bulky stationary computers in the last few years. The power of processors now allows us to use smaller, more mobile hardware to perform the same tasks. So, if people use their hardware on the go, we should bring our systems to them.

Giving the user content that is relevant to the physical space they are in at the moment makes a lot of sense. We are creatures of habit. While we love the reach of the Internet, we also want to be able to find things in our local area easily: people to meet, cafes to frequent, interesting buildings and activities to learn about.

For those of you that have still not joined the internet age, you now run the risk of falling even further behind competitors that are now beginning the move from traditional websites to mobile content delivery and geo-location advertising. As the mobile internet continues to grow, so geolocation will grow with it. It’s here to stay – and it knows where you are, too.

Contact us today to get a complete consult on getting your business on the web.

941.584.7417

Idiots, er, Barbarians at the Gate

Every day we are confronted with companies that continually do their clients a major disservice because they are uneducated in their chosen profession - web design. Most wouldn't know simple search engine optimization if it bit them firmly on the butt. These same people just don't know all the nuances of web delivery products, and therefore misinform clients, to the clients detriment.

Case in point: WordPress

WordPress is one of the Internet's secret superstars. It IS NOT exclusively for personal websites. And it IS NOT just a blogging platform. Well known companies like eBay, Yahoo, Ford, Sony, CNN, People Magazine and many more, use WordPress to deliver content to users worldwide.

Most web developers are frightened by WordPress - primarily because they don't "get it" and it threatens the income they earn from keeping your website up-to-date. Yet, your site can be a valuable tool, beyond your wildest dreams when using WordPress. Beyond the capabilites of uneducated web developers. Consider this:

• WordPress is scalable: WordPress is one of the few CMS platforms that serves trillions of pages daily, and if sites such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal and ZDNet are surviving perfectly well with their WordPress engines humming, your site will be fine too. Your site may not be as big as these, but WordPress is capable of growing with you.
  
  
• WordPress is Search Engine Friendly: Aside from the truly excellent All-in-One SEO pack, WordPress sites are well understood by Googlebot; and are one of the easiest types of sites to optimize. One of the most arduous parts of SEO is the mechanical, step-by-step routine of getting pages ready, and almost all of this is handled automatically. If every site was built on WordPress, the missing Title and Description attributes that we find on 50% of the sites we analyze would actually be there.
  
  
• With WordPress, you and your team can edit content: Web designers and home builders have one thing in common: they make more money out of changes you make to the original design. I know clients that were once accustomed to paying $80 per hour for simple edits to their websites - costing them thousands of dollars per year, which is quite frankly just shameful. This is truly like barbarians at the gate! With WordPress, you can hire a designer and SEO firm, set up the platform, and then make changes to pages, posts and layouts without having to cut checks. Editing WordPress pages is just like editing a Word document.

WordPress makes you focus on content. And in 2010, content is king. Static websites are DEAD!! Any web developer that tells you otherwise is guilty of stupidity at the highest level.

Contact us today to get a complete consult on using WordPress to deliver your business content on the web.

941.584.7417