George Fragos — Internet Coach - Designer - Writer
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Social Networking

Who hasn't heard of Facebook or MySpace. These are social networks. A social network gives every participant a web presence to a mash-up collection of applications like Blogs, Forums, Instant Messaging and Photo Albums. The participating member need not know anything about how to create a web page. Kids in particular have fallen in love with these social networks. They are free for alls with content that would make any parent cringe. There's a lot of advertising and hype. Everything has it's place but a social network isn't a substitute for a proper web presence. There are so many users that the individual gets lost. Businesses are experimenting with the likes of Facebook but the jury is still out. Does your business really want to be associated with pictures of adolescents mooning and baring boobs or even worse. Hopefully they aren't related to you. It's my personal opinion that social networking has become "Internet for Dummies."

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Twitter - Micro Blog

Twitter takes the blog concept but limits entries to 140 characters and sprinkles in a touch of social networking. The networking comes from inviting "followers" who will see all your posts sorted by time line with all others that they follow. I took a queue from Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz fame and use it for one liner press releases with URL links. Her language can be a bit rough but her marketing savvy is top notch. I Twitter post for every new addition or change to FragosTech.com. Twitter also provides a bit of simple HTML and Javascript to display your most recent Twitters on your page. I integrated them into my home page. Their appearance is controlled by my existing CSS and visually integrates into my site. The Twitters were dynamically updated in my site when I post my releases at Twitter. Unfortunately Twitter server performance was so unpredictable I decided to hard code the update notices for now. I will continue to use Twitter to post updates and generate links, just not for dynamic site input. Twitter is growing so fast that the site has difficulty responding to it's many users. Hopefully they will work on their performance issues. Twitter is a bit of a link factory and is already being abused by some users. We do however have control of whom we follow or allow to follow us. Time will tell if my PR Twitters result in links to my site. I'm inclined to think of Twitter as a useful tool. I make frequent updates to my site and Twitter should help people find me while also identifying my site as one that grows and expands regularly.

UPDATE: My use of Twitter has been abandoned. Useful concept but lousy implementation. It hasn't allowed me to add any posts in over a week. Another failing from my perspective is the conversion of my links to "tinyurl" which meant my links on Twitter worked but didn't register with web crawlers. My guess is that Twitter is under funded and doesn't have enough revenue to cover growth.

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SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO has become an industry. We've all used search engine — most popular being Google. Try a search for a simple word and the number of hits is in 10's of millions or more. Try that search with a two word phase and we're still in the 10's of thousand of hit. To make search work well with the dizzying amount of information on the Internet, search engines have developed complex algorithms to put the most likely at the top of the list. The goal of any site is to be in the top 10 hits. These algorithms are valuable intellectual property — trade secrets. Companies like Google and Yahoo continue to refine their algorithms. Some site developers try to fool the search engines into putting their site at the top of the list. It's almost like spy against spy.

There are honest ways to please search engines and move up the list. These honest ways are called SEO. Some of the basics are to have a well coded sites that follows to standards and will load quickly. The number of relevant external links is also a factor as is the relevance of the content of your site to itself. Try to fool mother search engine and you may be barred from appearing in search results. SEO is what separate the web professional from adolescent that spends most of their life on the web. Your kids can likely create you a web site but it will probably appear so far down the list of search results it will never be found. Somewhat acceptable for a personal home page but not for an enterprise.

There are other benefits that come out of the SEO process that are worthwhile on their own.

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Site goals

Site goals tie back to business goals. This list is representative and subject to modification to fit your needs.

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Site functions

These functions and perhaps others are combined to achieve site goals.

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