Much like Facebook and MySpace have taken the Internet by storm, your new website can help to captivate customers and give them a reason to return day after day. Maintain fresh new ideas and give visitors something to talk about regularly to keep them interested in your products and services. Giving users the ability to interact with your website makes them feel as if you care about them even before they are a customer.

In addition to social networking, we’re expanding our web programming to include mobile options. We’re here to help you build mobile websites and application for devices such as the Apple iPhone and Google Android-powered phones, as well as BlackBerrys and standard web-capable cell phones. Don’t let your mobile users down now and don’t miss out on the marketing potential you’re missing by having a non-mobile friendly website.

Contact us for more information on our custom website design, social networking and mobile application development.

Depending on the site, varying factors affect the type of users interacting with your website, which in turn affects which technologies the users will have and which browsers they will use. For example, W3schools, a very well known web technologies resource on the Internet shows that approximately 44% of its users used Firefox and 46% used Internet Explorer in the month of November. Sites like this cater to the more technoligically advanced crowd, which is more likely to use alternative browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, etc.

Regardless, the times have changed and we are now in an era where the majority of your audience can download and view Flash movies and Java applications, a far cry from the days when you crossed your fingers that JavaScript was enabled. This isn’t to say users regret the advance in technology, most users don’t even know the difference between the Flash portion of a webpage and a static image anymore. The integration of advancing technologies within website design has provided seemless integration of various media types.

Now that we’ve now entered the new year, we can only sit back and wait to see what new technologies await us in the upcoming year.

Before the evolution of the web, we were limited to pretty basic websites. Our designs were simple, square with rows and columns and animated GIFs. Times have immensively changed! The only question left to ask is: where do we go from here?

From a business perspective, there are many key benefits that social networking sites possess when compared to your traditional website. The first, and most obvious benefit, is the interaction social networking websites have with their visitors. Visitors aren’t simply reading the content from your pages, they are actively involved in the production and management of content within that site. Social networks benefit from the diversity that various groups of people-from different backgrounds, ethnicities, financial backgrounds, etc-can bring to the table. These differences provide a well-rounded environment where visitors feel welcome; it also promotes interaction which keeps visitors coming back.

Another major benefit to social networking is advertising, an no I’m not talking banner-ads here! Social networks have the great ability to self-promote themselves. As users find more and more special features and perks to your site over others, they’ll invite friends and the word will spread around the net. When comparing the advertising differences between social networking sites and others, there is no doubt that social networks that are successful require far less advertising than their stagnant static counterparts. This means that although the initial investment may be greater, gaining the ability to self-advertise rather than spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on lousy pay-per-click campaigns has a much more satisfying sound to it.

Now, not to contradict myself entirely now, don’t let this article fool you. Social networks CAN be a great tool for anyone, including businesses, however the key to a great social network is to provide somethign that ISN’T currently available. I have very little faith that you’re going to develop something that is going to deter users from Facebook if it already exists on Facebook. You have to be innovative, sometimes the simpler the better or catering to a specific target audience is all it takes. If all you take from this article is this last piece of advise, take it to heart. The key to a successful website is the initial dedication to make sure the job is done right. Users will not use a website that doesn’t work or looks difficult to use or navigate. The planning is the most crucial aspect of launching any website, including a social network.

Compared to any other form of advertising, setting up a quality website provides you with a long term advertisement option that far outweighs most other options. Television and radio ads help to drive customers in the short term, however if those busineses with websites are more likely to be refered to friends and family by customers; as they are able to see what you have to offer without feeling obligated to make a purchase or committment.

These are just a few ideas to think about when budgeting your advertising dollars.

Websites both large and small can benefit from the features a CMS brings to the table. The ease of updating, from any browser in the world, is one main perk of running your website within a CMS. It not only helps you to keep your content fresher, but helps to organize that content as well. Most content management systems control virtually every aspect of the website for you. Another main area of maintenance that they help to simplify is the navigation of the website. They create the navigation as you add, remove and edit pages, thus reducing your workload while providing a seamless navigation that users can easily pick up on.

Aside from the navigation, a content management system allows those who have little or no web experience to manage their own website. Countless small-businesses can vouch for the simplicity and ease of use a CMS can bring to them. It prevents the overhead cost of paying for the website to be updated every month, week, or day. Although the initial investment may be a little high than a static website, it will pay for itself in no time as visitors easily navigate your website and find the most up to date content imaginable.

First, how much is to much? It is a simple question, but when advertising it turns into a very complex problem. You want your ad to show up as much as possible, and the idea of competing with larger companies is great; but you must have the budget to do so. In trying to compete with others who were advertising on some of the same keywords we were after, our small budget quickly ran out in less than 2 weeks.

The turnover on AdWords, at least in my experience, is very minimal as well. In looking at the dispersion of impressions across the keywords, most of the impressions were served on the AdSense network, which yielded absolutely no hits let alone conversions. The remaining impressions were scattered across our selected keywords, any yielded some clicks but only a handful of conversions (a successful conversion was recorded whenever someone contacted us through the website). In my short experiment with AdWords, I find advertising on the AdSense network worthless, at least if you are offering a competitive service such as web design, the AdSense network just throws your ad onto anyone’s website that has content Google find to match what you’re wanting. With such little control, you’re just wasting time and money displaying ads on sites you don’t even know about.

So, to conclude my AdWords experiment, I must say I was let down by Google’s program. That isn’t to say it may not benefit a site that is selling goods, or targets a specific audience that isn’t currently being served, but if you wish to be found in a market that is already big then AdWords, in my opinion, is not worth it. I get the same exposure through a simple FREE Google search than I was getting through my AdWords campaign.

We officially launched our AdWords Campaign only a couple of days ago on Friday. Initially our ad was to specific, there weren’t enough broad keywords; so after adding some keywords and adjusting our maximum cost per click, we were able to launch the campaign on a much more solid ground. Since Monday, we have received over 1500 impressions. Granted impressions aren’t clicks, and without clicks that doesn’t amount to any more traffic than we had before; but the impressions alone are far more exposure than we got with relying on search engines alone. Exposure like this is great for a small-business that can’t compete with the hundreds of huge websites that hog up the results of popular keywords.

Although it is early in the campaign, it is hard to make a definitive decision on whether AdWords is for us or not; but so far the exposure is great and Google’s interface is simple to use and manage several ads, keywords, and more information all from one website. Once our campaign is able to run longer, look for more articles on AdWords and our success (or possible failure) with this program.

Not only have we added Perl to servers; but we have also added the log analyzer AWStats to provide our customers with simple, easy-to-use statistical information about the users visiting their websites.Customers:

To enable Perl, login to your MyFTWebD account at http://my.ftwebd.com/ and navigate to your domain. Once there; select “Web Settings” and on the bottom of that page you will see a checkbox to enable Perl support.

To enable and view your AWStats, login to your MyFTWebD account and navigate to your domain. Once there; select “Statistics” and look for “Advanced Statistics”.