The Diablog - it's Diabloglical™

The one thing you must have to succeed in business.

2 September 2010

Simply having a website isn't enough any more. As a business owner, you threaten the success of your company if you don’t understand how to leverage the internet to bring in customers and increase sales.

When talking with site owners, I am often asked to explain the concept of content management. Believe me, it’s OK to ask, “What exactly is a content management system?” If you don’t understand current technology, your competitors will pick you apart.

The true power of a content management system (commonly referred to as a CMS) is often overlooked. The top two reasons most businesses say they want a CMS are:

• non-technical people can edit content
• content can be kept fresh because editing is so easy.

There are much more compelling reasons to power your site with a CMS like Dialogs. Dynamic CMS websites are far more flexible than the hard-coded sites of the past. You can do more with your content than leave it sitting on one page of your site. You can spread around your content so it catches more attention. You can personailize content for individual site visitors. Content can adjust itself based on external conditions like the date. You can also win Google’s attention with less effort if you have the right CMS. If Google likes you, you will find more customers.

One of the hidden benefits of developing websites with a CMS is development efficiency. On more than one occasion, a web developer has told us that their customer decided they didn’t want a CMS, but the developer was going to build the site in Dialogs anyway (and not even tell their customer). They know that manually building every page is much more work than configuring Dialogs. It’s also harder to maintain.

Building a static website is like building a house completely from scratch. And I mean completely from scratch, like a hand made cabin in the woods, not a custom modern house in the burbs. Before you can frame the house you cut down some trees and cut up the logs into lumber. If you want nails, you heat up a forge and hammer out some nails from raw steel. Some things are just too difficult to do from scratch, so you settle for less. For example, you dig a well for water, but you opt for a bucket instead of running water inside the house.

Building a dynamic website is like building that modern house. Milled lumber, nails, pipe - all the parts needed to build your house - are purchased. Someone else expended the effort to make the materials you need so you can jump right into the construction. When compared to first scenario, your house was 30% finished on day one of construction. Plus, you don't have to settle for anything. You can have running water and electricity and internet access.

You might think, “Nobody builds houses from scratch any more.” Well, successful websites aren’t built from scratch any more either.

Building a website in Dialogs is like being 30% done before you start. It’s also like building a house with power tools instead of a hammer and a handsaw. Ask us for a tour. We’re sure you’ll like what you see.

If your website is a business necessity, then so is Google.

29 September 2009

I talk to a lot of people about how to work the web. Some of them have a limited understanding about how search engines work and how to take advantage of them. One comment I hear occasionally is, "I don't care about Search Engine Optimization."

Really?

Let's think this through. Most companies have something for sale - widgets for consumers, parts for other businesses, service time, whatever. Selling those "whatevers" is how companies stay in business. So who is buying all this stuff? Customers, of course. This is easy: make stuff and sell it to customers. When I ask these SEOphobes where they get their customers, they often answer that they have all the customers they need.

Again, really?

Customers never stay forever. Here's my time-proven sales process: land a new customer, go celebrate, start the next day by looking for a replacement for the new customer. They never stay. The customer you've dealt with for 20 years retires and their replacement has their own favorite vendors. The customer moves their company to another state. They're bought out. They go out of business. I could name a hundred reasons why customers go away. I can't think of one reason why they would stay forever.

Advertising and marketing for most companies is really customer replacement. If new customers outnumber the customers who leave, the business is growing. Vice versa? The business is dying. Finding new customers is a necessary task for every business.

A website can be a huge contributor to this effort, but only if it generates new leads. A business owner recently told me that the reason he doesn't care about SEO is because he is planning to use direct mail to drive traffic to his website. That misses the point of a website. If you know someone, mail them your product info. A successful website connects you to people you don't know.

For someone who is struggling to understand how the web works, that seems like a catch-22. How do you talk to someone you haven't met? The answer is Google. Yes, there are other search engines, but most people use Google. (Besides, if you do well with Google, you'll do well with the others.) Google knows what people are looking for because people tell them every time they enter a search term. The greatest thing about Google is that they are happy to tell you what everyone is looking for. They are turning supply-and-demand economics into demand-and-supply.

It has never been easier to see what people want. SEO is a strategy for getting seen by people who have already said they are looking for you. SEO takes effort (check out SEO Toolbox to see how Dialogs can help), but the effort pays off. Google wants to help - that's how they stay in business. When they help you find new customers, they are growing. And if you aren't finding new customers, you are going under.

Really.

Of sailors and webhosts ...

22 September 2009

I'm a perfectionist. I surround myself with perfectionists. My business partners, my wife, even my five-year-old daughter strive for perfection. No one has feared more a potential blight on his "permanent record" than I. But, alas, even with conscientious, deliberate carefulness the vessel guided by my own hand does, from time to time, find a way to run aground.

Kaleidoscope provides hosting services to our Dialogs customers. We do so for one primary reason: we truly don't trust anyone else to do a better job. We're meticulous, security-minded folk that have been around long enough to know how important it is to take the appropriate precautions and - importantly - how to take the appropriate precautions. We employ seasoned administrators with decades of technical know-how, own high quality, top-manufacturer equipment in a state-of-the-art, high capacity, high security data center. We keep spare critical devices for rapid replacement. We backup data with obsession. We insist on redundancy: redundant power, redundant data paths, redundant HVAC, redundant backups. We nightly off-site our backups. We schedule time to brainstorm how things can go wrong and what to do about it. The steps we take to ensure a quality hosting experience for our customers is quite extensive. And it's a good thing we do this, because technology in a word, breaks.

One of the servers in the Kaleidoscope data center suffered downtime this week. The server began to experience periodic episodes of non-responsiveness. The specifics were odd, really, but in the end, we restored several of our hosting customers to a hot-spare server waiting for the opportunity to get off the bench and actually do something. We had a protocol; we had current data; we had a stand-by server; we had all hands on deck to resolve the issue. Still, several of our customers experienced multiple episodes of downtime spanning from one to several minutes each before the entire issue was fully diagnosed and resolved. As a perfectionist, knowing that my hosting customers were experiencing even a few minutes of downtime was excruciating.

It is the way with complex systems that they are complex. And complex things are prone to failure. We've all come to experience high levels of reliability in the technical implements of our world. What begins as appreciation becomes expectation. I can easily find myself irritated when my cell phone connection with someone half-way across the globe begins to falter for a few seconds, expecting absolute perfection out of a string of technologies I couldn't hope to count - let alone fully understand. The hosting industry requires high levels of redundancy and backup for the same reason that ships carry life-boats: things do go wrong.

A long-time friend (and excellent sailor) once told me, while at the wheel of his beautiful 36-foot Alden ketch, "There are three kinds of sailors, Brett: those who have run aground, those about to run aground ... and liars."

I thought about those words yesterday as I worked alongside my team to restore stability to our affected web hosting customers. Website up-time is important. Critical. Business depend on it. Our hosting environment, equipment, software and protocols are designed to maximize up-time. We exposed a bit of imperfection this week I'll concede; but we did not expose failure: we did resolve the issue with no customer data loss. As a Google apps customer I know that even the largest organizations with the most inexhaustible budgets and resources also are susceptible to occasional downtime (Google apps were down for a few hours earlier this month).

Like Google I assume, my team learns from every technical issue we encounter. We identify previously unconsidered weak points and address them. My team is hard at work devising adjustments to our setup that will better protect from this specific type of issue should it reoccur. We've refined our protocols so that we will be even more efficient in restoring service. It's what experienced professionals do. In my mind, the most important differentiator of web hosting options is not the amount of storage or bandwidth for a particular price or any of the other statistics you typically see, but the level of experience and professionalism of the actual people at the wheel. If you pick the right people, you can depend on them to make the right decisions about storage space, bandwidth, and redundancies of technologies you really need not fully understand. And, critically, you can depend on them to safely pull you off the rocks when you do go aground.

Kaleidoscope has hosted websites for our customers for over 14 years and the occasional, non-scheduled downtime - no more than 0.0001% down time in total - still strikes me to the core like a bad mark on my permanent record. But bear in mind, any organization that touts a history of no down-time has either not been around long enough or will eventually be humbled. Or, I suppose, they could be liars ....